Flush It Friday: It’s Bandcamp Fr… I Saw Pg. 99 This Weekend.
Priorities.
Yes, yes. It’s Bandcamp Friday, which is a great thing, and a thing of which there are only a few left. You can buy a shirt about it now, though I imagine not a few of us have mixed feelings about that. Over at Hypnotic Dirge, where all digital albums are NYP and the entire digital discography can be had for 25 euros, you can also use the code “BC_FRIDAY” for 20% off whatever you decide to purchase. Transcending Obscurity, if you can believe this, is offering NYP on all digital albums throughout the entire month of May and has also announced new forthcoming records from Carnophage and Monument of Misanthropy. Use the code “doomer” at Transylvanian Recordings for 20% off! You can even get all 233 Avantgarde Music releases for 90% off the sticker price, knocking that down to a digestible 100 euros or so. There’s probably all sorts of other deals I don’t even know about. I’m sure you could also pay full price for lots of stuff you want. That seems like a real likelihood!
You know who also has a nice BCF deal? Pg. 99. For $15 (50% off), you can snag Documents 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, and 14. Hell, I own all those records, and I still might do it, out of principle or out of allegiance or out of a cursed need to consume or as an homage to the weekend in Chicago that was.
I fear, now that I’ve seen Pg. 99 after over two decades of not seeing them, that I have little to say about it all. Some bands stay so shrouded in mystery, in legend, in lore, in mythos, that you don’t quite know what to do when confronted with their very quotidian existence. But then you still have to marvel at 9 old dudes crammed onto the tiniest of stages at Chicago’s Subterranean, playing to a relatively small audience half comprising old fogey scenesters like me and half comprising kids who were born after Anthony Stubelek mastered Document #13 (2002) in the music studio hidden in the guitar store in downtown Brunswick where my friends and I took guitar lessons in high school. They played much of what you’d both want and expect, with just a dash of the unexpected. You got a lot of Document 8, of course, but you then also got “Living in the Skeleton of a Happy Memory” from Document 7 and “Faces Sunken by Letting Go” from Document 12, and as any of us cantankerous cranks can tell you, Docs. 7 and 12 are really the two best records, even if Docs 5 and 8 are the most popular and probably actually the best, that doesn’t matter because 7 always gets overlooked and 12 might have five of the best Pg. 99 songs ever (plus all those Majority Rule songs which count and don’t count, of course). There was the mid-set huddle, the acknowledgement that 25 years ago the band would have spent the rest of the set soaking the venue in guitar feedback that would inevitably alienate most of the audience, the apology “for [still being bad at our jobs” after a couple chords had to be replaced, Chris Taylor trying to find any way to be anywhere in the building but just on the stage (he finally clambered up some back-of-stage stairs before leaping into the fray during the closing song). It all seemed to be there. And just like they have so many times before, they closed with “By the Fireplace in White,” friends joining on stage to bolster the track’s rumbling rhythm as the rest of the band falls to the ground in some ritualistic prostration to the gods of haunted melodies and lives.
And they did it all again, the next night, at the Metro, a normal-sized venue with a stage that made it feel comfortable and reasonable to have 9 members and a sold-out audience that seemed to take the band aback. If Sunday night was part of the reunion tour and a special benefit show organized by Saetia and featuring City of Caterpillar in support and very much in the year 2024, then Saturday was something different, helped by New Jersey upstarts Massa Nera, something that felt more of a time out of time. Sunday was seeing the band in 2024; Saturday was an effigy to, a simulacrum of 2001. I didn’t feel younger nor did anyone look younger (we all felt and looked our increasingly uncomfortable ages), but the atmosphere was provocative or inebriating enough to trick you, even if for just a second, that you were transported. So I guess I did have something to say, after all.
Shouldn’t I keep going? Shouldn’t I talk about how we actually missed City of Caterpillar on Sunday and then left before Saetia? Shouldn’t I mention then walking a good ways over to Delilah’s on Lincoln where pool was free upstairs and they cranked Bongzilla and we drank so many pickle beers and won so many pool games and felt so at home in a different city? Shouldn’t I?
Maybe. But what I will do is Flush It, Flush It Real Good.
The Monday Stick and This Roldy Tuesday are indelible parts of the week.
Toilet Radio 494, wherein Joe n Jordan play real fast and loose with some 20 Buck Spin Fantasy Labelball. Please don’t revoke our promo privileges!
Big Rolderathis the Great and Benevolent blighted our nucleons with a gorgeous new track from Liminal Shroud.
Iron Goddess of Mercy followed suit and holed your worm with a premiere of the latest Last of Lucy single. (I’d never worm your hole.)
There it is! The last week of April into the first week of May. Go back and read and listen to everything we’ve brought to you, sweet readers. Share with us your BCF hauls, your Goods, your Bads, your Uglies. Talk to me about Pg. 99 and also about how Malady is secretly the best band to ever come from that scene and what we really need is a Malady reunion tour and that I’ll travel wherever (whenever) for it. And after all that, have a beautiful weekend and get all the consensual kisses and hugs your heart desires. Keep it dollop.
