"Let's go dark to see what we find.
Turn out the lights and start to lose our minds."
-- God Module, "Let's Go Dark"

So, I had a weird night last night. In some ways it was amazing, in others, really kind of crap.

Let's start with the amazing, shall we? (I'll leave the crap part for the end so that you can skip it.)

The show at DNA was fucking awesome. Hands down. Do not pass Go. Balls to the proverbial wall. AWESOME.

Quick run down:

Twitch the Ripper was an interesting 2-man crew. Good beat, high energy. A sort of strange electro with Depeche Mode-style vocals. I'm not sure completely what my final analysis is. They were odd without feeling goofy. They were energy intensive, without being over-the-top. I definitely enjoyed them, so, thumbs up, I guess? How non-committal of me.

System Syn was a whole lot of awesome. Good solid energy and they played well to the crowd. You probably already know how good they are if you've heard any of their albums. So multiply that by two, at least, when seeing them in concert.

God Module - How to describe these guys? Imagine the best parts of the Cure getting in a car wreck with a bus-load of Heaven's Gate cultists. Limbs mangled and twisted and their music and screams turned to a rhythmic shriek of twisted steel while half of them start turning into zombies. Well, that's what I think of God Module.

In case you couldn't tell, that's my morbid idea of a compliment.

Imperative Reaction - The headliners. The primary reason many of us were there (not to say that System Syn and God Module weren't excellent draws on their own, but IR is really damned awesome). These guys were even better than the last time I saw them back in March. Pure high-intensity electro-industrial pretty-boy goodness. Where everyone else's energy was high, these guys were through the fucking roof and they didn't stop the whole time.

Of course, Clint Carney was basically on stage for everything except Twitch's performance, since he's involved with all three of the latter bands. If he was exhausted, he didn't let it slip, though.

Also, the whole crowd sang Happy Birthday to Adam Vex... Let it not be said that SFGothic wishes anything different: Happy B-day, Mr. Vex. I hope you found your party as much fun as I had watching it.

The evening closed with a final IR song with all the bands taking over the stage and screaming into the mics. Pure, unadulterated awesome, straight to into my black little soul.

Which was nice, considering that the non-musical portions of the evening kind of sucked ass. (This is the part that is skippable, if you're not interested in anything other than the performance - but it's my blog, so I'm going to take the space to vent some of my angst.)

First, I was stood up. That was extremely disappointing and left me in something of a funk as the show started up. (I'm trying to pacify my indignance with the knowledge that this person missed a very excellent show.)

Second, one of the DNA staff kind of jammed me up about dropping off my business cards for SFGothic. Now, I've asked the bartenders in the past if it's okay for me to leave cards laying around and they didn't seem to object. The remainder of the staff has seen me dropping off my cards for the past six months (including this staff member that gave me the hard time). And, to add insult to injury, I just spent part of an evening last week defending the DNA staff from some acquaintances that were complaining very strongly about past issues they've had with them.

To be charitable (and in retrospect), the staff-member was certainly just trying to give me a more-than-fair warning - he told me that the staff have been instructed to immediately eject people doing what I was doing. And, instead, he gave me a warning and let me stop. So I should probably be immensely more grateful than I'm coming across.

But it came off a little intimidating and, coupled with the aforementioned "being stood up", it just threw more bad feelings all over my evening.

Third and finally, heading home, I was going a bit too fast on the Bay Bridge. So, like those guys I'm usually laughing at, I got pulled over by the CHP. They gave me a quick sobriety test and a pleasant, but stern, warning (rather than a ticket) and then very politely gave me directions on the best way to get back on the 80 after being pulled off onto the 580 for my temporary detaining.

But still. Most surreal evening in a very long time.

-- Mr. M.

So, hopefully, the site will soon be up and running and people will be seeing this first blogpost before too much time elapses.

Hooray!

Some of you (especially the cybers) are probably asking: "Weebly? Really, dude?" Yeah. But it was easy, fast, fairly functional, and, most importantly at this juncture, free. If I manage to keep this up for any length of time, maybe I'll move on to a "real" webserver. But for now, Weebly will be the home of SFGothic.net. And you little gothlings will learn to like it.

Now, onto old news... specifically the news that made me want to start this site in the first place.

About a month ago, Death Guild, San Francisco's oldest goth night (at the ever-saucy DNA Lounge, no less) had it's 18th birthday (Awww... How sweet? Now she's old enough to date without going to jail!). Now, I missed the first night of celebrations unfortunately. And I couldn't make it to the club on Monday night either.

But on Tuesday night, March the 15th. Holy hell. On Tuesday night, I made time.

So, first up that evening was Panic Lift. Never heard their name before, but these boys from Jersey might be something to look out for in the future. Good energy, awesome performance, solid beat. My only complaint might be their front-man's over-reliance on voice distortion. I went ahead and picked up their album, Witness to Our Collapse, anyway. All around, they seem to hit all the Industrial notes solidly. They're not blazing any trails yet, but they're still a good listen.

Next up was the real reason I was there. You see, that same week was my 12th anniversary with my fiance. And she loves herself some Ayria (I'm rather fond of her myself). To say that the illustrious Ms. Parkin was awesome that evening would be an understatement of nigh epic proportion. She was beautiful. She was fashionable. She was high energy. She gave lots of love to the crowd.

And the most awesome part? Even though I shot her an email less than 36 hours before the show, she still managed to dedicate a song to my girl at my request (Blue Alice, in case you're wondering... Yes, we're weird). And to top it off? She totally let us go fan-monkey on her - she signed our copy of her Hearts For Bullets album, let us take lame phone-photos with her, and even wished us a happy 12th.

Now that's a lady with some class and love for her fans. I hope to see a lot more of her out on this side of the world in the future. If you read this, Ms. Parkin, thank you yet again for making that night super special!

Down at the bottom are some pics from her performance. See how awesome they look in their ridiculous blurriness? Now, imagine how cool it looked in real life!!!

You can't, huh? Well, I'm pretty sure that lack of imagination is a failing of you as a human being, evidenced by you not having been there in the first place. We'll have to discuss that another time, though.

Finally, to close the night out, we got hit with Imperative Reaction.

Now, I'd heard these guys a couple times on DigitalGunfire.com and liked what I'd heard. But, I'll be honest; when a bunch of pretty-faced goth-bois (Yes, I hate men that are prettier than me. No, I don't feel the need to explain why.) got on the stage, I was expecting the rest of the night to be a buzzkill.

Holy fuck was I wrong.

Despite their almost too pretty look, these gents played hard, heavy, and intense. With their guitar-heavy electro-industrial sound and some solid showmanship skills, they kept the energy in the DNA Lounge burning hot. If I hadn't already been so impressed by Ayria (and still slightly starstruck by her sheer coolness), I'd have been completely blown away by their performance. That said, I bought a couple of their albums on the spot and have added the remainder of their catalog to my wishlist for future acquisition.

Hard to argue against that sort of endorsement, really.

-- Mr. M.