MONDAY, AUGUST 7:

Foot Foot began their month-long odyssey at Pehrspace the only way they knew how: playing their wonderful tunes—ACTUAL TUNES! They may be the one band on the scene that doesn’t get off by being full of shock tactics and visuals, but by actually writing well-put-together pieces of music with stories and harmonies. Hopefully more bands will be coming like Foot Foot, which could put an end to the tiresome and overdone psychedelic trend of recent times. It wasn’t all about Foot Foot tonight, though—opening act Amps for Christ were a thrill for all the musicians in the audience. Their guitarist plays out of homemade amps, and switches between a mandolin run through oscillators, a bazooki, and a trance-inducing sitar. His playing is far from minimalist, so a mysterious man who wears a drum machine as a necktie and the guitarist’s gorgeous stepdaughter who plays autoharp and keyboards keep the rhythm tight and together. However, both bands tonight were upstaged by Au—a four-piece group of multi-instrumentalists that play everything from the guitar to the musical saw. To get a feel for what they sound like, listen to the Charles Mingus record Pithecanthropus Erectus and imagine a rock band reinterpreting it. They write songs that at first feel somewhat loose and about to fall apart, just like man as he learns to take his first steps, but then all of a sudden they’ll hit you with the visceral feeling of walking upright without collapse and without failure. (DR)