Girls Against Boys w/Therapy? and Skeleton Key
May 11, 1996 @ St. Andrew's Hall, Detroit, MI
Girls Against Boys: 75

When you walk into a good independent record store, there are some bands which you hear a huge buzz about. There are certain bands who are part of a supposed conspiracy by indie record store clerks to keep them a huge secret. These bands, according to the theory, become buzzwords in a coolness society set up by these people and college radio DJs. By naming these bands, they are able to prove they belong. Some of these bands are really good and are never heard of by mainstream society. Others are merely average and only add to this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, Girls Against Boys fall into the second half of these bands. When you wander into an indie store, you'll hear a lot of buzz about Girls Against Boys, but be really weary about believing it.

To be totally fair to Girls Against Boys, the group I was with left only five songs into their set. However, from that many songs I could easily tell their sound. They were every bit as heavy as could be expected from a Touch And Go band. Their sound was slow yet intense and the crowd was nodding their head to the steady onslaught. The thing which distracted more than anything was they had a power outage after the first song and had to pause for a few minutes. This showed a weakness of the band. The band just kind of stood there with nothing to say. A different band might have capitalized on this and gone into a monologue. But the lead singer just stood there and asked, "how are you?" about seven different ways, finally gave up and said, "let's pretend this didn't happen." Once I had seen this much of the bands, I knew exactly why the indie store clerk dig them so much. The band reminded me of the clerks themselves. Really intense about the music and knowledgeable enough to back up the intensity but at the same time extremely bland and at times uninteresting to listen to.