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Out
BMA blues
BY WILL SPITZ

In just their second year of operating the Boston Music Awards, the event’s new organizers found a new way to piss off the audience that the old organizers never thought of: shut down the bars. Last year, new owner Chip Rives noted that the pros attending the Wang Center tended to congregate at the taps in the lobby. So this year’s 17th annual BMA ceremony was held, for a standing room audience of insiders, at the drink-friendly Avalon, but during the streamlined one-hour ceremony, almost all of Avalon’s bars were shut down, and that compelled BMA (Boredoutta My Ass) scenesters to line up at the only tap left — you guessed it, the one in the lobby. On stage, Aerosmith’s Tom Hamilton deigned to accept an obligatory award for Major Label Album of the Year, observing that the trophy — can we at least make up a decent nickname for these things? — was "shinier" than his Grammy. And after noting that he’d grown up seeing some of his British Invasion idols play in the same room (it was known back then as the Boston Tea Party), he handed the Best Local Hard Rock Award to Scissorfight, who are now working on an album called Jaggernaut. Backstage, or at least behind a tiny curtained-off area stage left, Kay Hanley, the Unseen, punk-rock aerobicizers Hilken Mancini and Maura Jasper, and burly Scissorfight frontman Ironlung rubbed elbows. Ironlung lamented the recent accidental erasure of a hard drive containing Jaggernaut tracks-in-progress. "A minor technical disruption," he sniffed, and indeed, since the original 15 tracks had been recorded in a mere two days, the band (self-described as "Mother Nature’s cruelest mistake") foresee no trouble in re-recording them.

The proportion of music-industry suits was considerably lower the following evening at Dynasty, Ben Sisto’s monthly dance night at Allston’s Great Scott, where a crowd of about 150 showed up despite a pouring rain to dust off moves ranging from the understated Indie Rock Shuffle to that livelier classic, the Cabbage Patch. Noxagt, an instrumental Norwegian avant-garde noise trio (bass, drums, and viola), warmed up the crowd with thoroughly undanceable arty sludge. The band went over with just about universal approval, and the audience didn’t blink an eye when the noise gave way to DJ Comfortable Matt — it simply started boogieing to selections that ranged from Bowie to Jay-Z, and from the Smiths to Wu-Tang.

Three nights later, on Sunday, it was déjà vu all over again as many of the same people found their way back to Great Scott for Sisto’s birthday party. The 24-year-old, who has been booking weekly Sunday-night shows at the club since August, was also celebrating the second anniversary of Honeypump, a booking agency that grew out of his Internet message board of the same name. Honeypump regulars Night Rally, UV Protection, and Squids performed, but they weren’t all greeted with equal enthusiasm. UV Protection, a group of bizarre, futuristic female droids-with-keyboards, prompted an unsuspecting patron to voice loud dissatisfaction: "I paid seven bucks for this? What the fuck is this?" Let’s hope he stuck around to catch Night Rally: picture Lester Bangs with a Rollie Fingers moustache and you’ve got guitarist/vocalist Devin King, who played ambient, delay-drenched guitar lines and yelped like Pere Ubu’s David Thomas over a Fugazi-esque rhythm section. A couple of years ago, you’d have had to go down the street to O’Brien’s for this kind of thing, but by the end of the night, King was thanking Great Scott — for so long the last bastion of squareness in Allston Rock City — "for becoming one of my favorite venues in town."


Issue Date: October 8 - 14, 2004
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