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THE LOVE SCENE
FENWAY IN ALLSTON
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Last year, Mark Kates, the former Grand Royal honcho who’s been back in Boston signing bands to his Fenway Recordings label, launched a monthly Fenway Recordings Sessions series at the Paradise Lounge to showcase up-and-coming artists both with and without ties to his label. The idea was to intersperse live performances with music spun by Kates’s alter ego, DJ Carbo. A week ago Tuesday, after a few months off, the Fenway Sessions returned, but this time at the Allston club Great Scott, a long-time neighborhood hangout for sports fans and college kids that’s been reborn as a bastion of indie cool over the past six months. Boasting a compact viewing area near the stage and a roomy bar, the spacious, casual room is well suited to hanging out. With a roster of artists that includes the raucous Read Yellow and Mission of Burma bassist Clint Conley’s less caustic Consonant, Fenway is focusing on impassioned, guitar-based rock. And the 40 or so people who showed up at Great Scott were treated to a hefty dose of just that from the NYC-based Love Scene. Having already released a debut EP on Fenway, the foursome took the opportunity to unveil songs from their debut full-length, If I Knew What I Was Doing Do You Think I Would Be Doing This, which was produced by Mike Daly (Whiskeytown) and is due out this spring. "A Stone To Call My Own" was rootsy enough to conjure the J. Geils Band with more of a modern-rock flavor — think Jet. Later, those roots headed South as "Something’s Got To Give" segued playfully into the Marshall Tucker Band tune "Can’t You See." The crowd had thinned by the time the show’s non-Fenway-affiliated band, the Capitol Years, took the stage to unveil tracks from their March release Let Them Drink (Burn & Shiver). The Philadelphia foursome didn’t seem to mind as they delved into a different kind of roots rock: Yardbirds-influenced psychedelia. The addition of a monthly Fenway Recording Sessions night will bolster Great Scott’s reputation as a new hot spot. Add the punk and metal of Wednesday’s Blackout Bar, a weekly event that’s also made the move from the Paradise Lounge, and the popular Friday Britpop dance night the Pill, which after several moves has likewise settled in, and you can see why Great Scott is putting Allston on the local-music map.
BY SARAH TOMLINSON
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