Pretty Girls Make Graves, the Fuse!, and Mahjongg
Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, CA
March 11, 2004

V and i met up with Lance at Bottom of the Hill last night to catch Pretty Girls Make Graves, with openers Mahjongg and repeat PGMG supporters The Fuse!. Once again online show schedules screwed me, as we intentionally arrived at 9:30 to miss most of Mahjongg, and instead found they hadn't even gone on yet. They were interesting, for all the wrong reasons. Their first three or four songs suggested they were going for a Rapture, Radio 4 kind of indie dance rock sort of sound. However, they weren't particularly engaging, and moreover they were not cohesive. At all. During one song, i realized that no two of the five band members were in time or in tune. That's pretty impressive, considering all the possible combinations. The Fuse! came on next, thankfully not spending an hour to set up this time. And again, they kicked some serious ass. There wasn't as much open aggression with the audience as last time, perhaps because of the raised stage at Bottom. Still an ear-shredding, knock-you-over set. PGMG came on around 11:15. I was fairly disappointed with their last performance at the Cafe Du Nord, but they sounded much better this time round. They've tightened up the live versions of the songs from their latest album The New Romance, which were the weak element of their last gig in SF. There were five or six guys in the crowd that went apes@$t for the whole set. One crowd surfed, fell down, crowd surfed, fell down, then crowd surfed some more. A few girls just behind us got several good kicks in the head. All i could think of was if he surfed over me, i was going to do a number on his testicles as he went by. My one complaint about the band is that the singer appears to think "The Getaway", one of the standouts from their first album, is too dated for them to play now. She was visibly agitated when the rest of the group began playing it during the encore, in response to repeated requests from the audience. A band with two albums cannot start claiming their "older" material is no longer suitable.

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