So, this is becoming a tradition. SMB shows at the Chatterbox being three shades of screwed up. Like I said in my prior post this was supposed to be a 6–9 show. Well, being all psyched I made the mistake of showing up on time. HAH!

6 o’clock and Shinyville is still setting up and SMB is nowhere to be found. Anyhoot, blah blah blah. at about a quarter to seven Donkey Fruit Punch takes the stage. For all those that might be wondering who Donkey Fruit Punch (DFP) is… well you wouldn’t the only one. DFP is an erotigrind improve duo, staring Scott (lead singer of Shinyville) and Luke (I don’t know who Luke is???). The best part is that DFP was founded less than 24 hours before this show.

Describing the anomaly that is Donkey Fruit Punch is a little hard. The easiest way to put it is noise. The sounds seemed to be built around samples that were looped through Luke’s laptop. Scott traded off between playing scratchy guitar and screaming/moaning/singing through an array of distortion effects. While Luke banged the drums and shared in the guitar fun with an overall heavy grind. I will admit that towards the end I could see the beginning of a very interesting collaboration in this newly christened endeavor.

Up next Shinyville, and still no sign of SMB. I must forewarn you that I do judge Shinyville a little harsher than most bands that I see live. Simply for the fact that I have seen them at least a dozen times over the last four or five years. In that time I’ve seen them play tight, every beat perfect all of the crazy effects and randomness of their song laid out like a buffet for your ears, these are the shows I love. Friday–oh Friday was not good, it seemed that everything was loose, a bit sloppy, definitely not Shinyville at their best. Just a quick note—Shinyville is heading out on Tuesday for a quick tour of NYC and the surrounding area, and this was intended to be they’re warmup gig. As with most practice rounds Friday’s show was fraught with technical difficulties. Namely the newest version of Golemite their iPod and spiritual leader would play songs out of order and started some in the middle. These glitches could’ve been overlooked if it weren’t for the fact that on top of this the music was literally painful to listen to. Almost every song had good parts, but they all became distorted to an unrecognizable degree. The vocals were completely washed out, I couldn’t make out over half of the lyrics. The rest of the music came out as a flood of really ef’d up noise. Every tune just broke down halfway through and devolved into something that more closely resembled a pure noise band than anything else.

All I can say is that by the end of Shinyville’s set my ears felt like they were bleeding, and not in a good way.

By the time Shinyville takes down it’s about 8:30, and low and behold SMB is out in the parking lot not knowing whether they should come in or not. Jaime, Shinyville’s guitarist, goes out and checks to see what they’re up to. Basically, what I heard is that sound man said that if they come in they will get ten minutes to play and then they have to get off the stage for the late show.

In true Screaming Mechanical Brain fashion they decide to play on. They couldn’t let the dozen or so people who showed up to see them play go home disappointed. By 8:40 they have their equipment setup, and sound check done, and their set commences. Rev. John starts by introducing their new guitarist Turf, and with only a few minutes to play he takes requests from the audience.

They start out by ripping into an oldie but goodie ZYQ9. The “crowd” is digging it, heavy, fast and full of scream, exactly what you’d expect from SMB. Next comes Tetris, their ode to everyone’s favorite falling block game. After Tetris comes the granddaddy of all covers, SMB’s rendition of the Happy Happy Joy Joy song from the Ren and Stimpy show. This song is a riot, nice and crunchy, everyone was totally into it. I even saw some of the early comers for the late show nodding along. Then they played the title track off of their new cd “There is No GOD in Space.” No God is just a nice moshy, get up and jump kinda song and really gets your blood pumping. After just four songs I figure this night has been fully redeemed, as does my mate J-oLi, whom I drug away from a nice cozy bar full of our coworkers to see Shinyville play. Fully redeemed I thought the show would be over, but somehow SMB begged enough time for one more song. They ended their set with “Wundershozen” this is the song were Cass Nee trades in his bass for a keyboard and you half expect a little synthpop ditty to fall out, but it doesn’t. The chorus is a frenzy and that is what we turned it into. You wouldn’t think that slam dancing would be very fun with only three and a half people (sorry for dragging you into it Jaime), but it was a perfect cap on the show, so hurrah for us, and hurrah for Screaming Mechanical Brain for having the stones to hop up on stage for 15 minutes and rock our asses off.

I think the only negative I can throw at their performance, aside from being fashionably late due to van/trailer rental issues) is I haven’t quite warmed up to Turf their new guitarist. Turf is taking over duties for Owen Good III, who founded the band with John back in the day. I’m not going to speculate on the events that surround the Owen out/Turf in bit, but I will say that I missed seeing his weird pseudo-robotic style of playing.

That’s it, my first honest to goodness concert revue is in the bag. I think that I’ll catch up with Shinyville when they get back from their outing in NYC and see how that went, and who knows maybe I’ll get my first interview too.

P.S. I almost forgot Shinyville just had some awesome t-shirts printed. They feature a Llama bomber squadron and contains secret metaphysical messages—oooooooooh. Get yours before they run out, this was a limited run of 40, medium and large only.