Mikki's Top 10 for Total Fest

Mikki Lunda's Top 10-ish bands she's most excited to see at Total Fest XIII:

(in particular order)

1. Greco- Fri. 8pm, Palace
I hear from a reliable source that he wears a full-body-tiger-print-cat-suit, when he plays live.  And he's a bigger shameless self promoter than I am. All of his songs are about how rad he is.
[Editor's Note: You can listen to a couple of his tracks here at the Total Fest band camp.]

2. Obnox- Thurs. 9:15, ZACC
Dane Hansen (Bad Naked) told me "you can't miss this set."

3. Shannon & the Clams- Thur. 10:45pm, ZACC
I love this band's live energy. I've seen them bunches of times and they still made my top 3, that's saying something.

4. Underground Railroad to Candyland- Fri. 9:45pm, Palace
Last month I played with these guys in Pomona, CA. They are a party on stage, super fun to watch and are super tight. (multiple drummers)

5. j sherri- Sat. 12pm, Big Dipper
I'm just going to come right out and say it. These hotties have been my favorite local band for the last 2 years. I'm stoked to see them in the HOT HOT summer sun while licking a melty ice cream.

6. Woolen Men- Thur. 8pm, ZACC
I've never seen them live, but I NEED YOU TO KNOW: I really dig their sound.

7. Toupee- Sat. 8pm, Badlander
My pop idol, Richard Album, was in town last week and he said "in Chicago, anyone with our musical integrity will have this band on their list of favorites". I trust that.

8. Dreamsalon- Fri. 10pm, Palace
I've never seen them live, but I NEED YOU TO KNOW: I really dig their sound.

9. Kitten Forever, Sat. 10:15pm, Badlander
This band does it right. How they figured out how to transition instruments like that, is a straight up miracle.

10. Wimps- Sat. 9:15pm, Badlander
I've never seen them live, but I NEED YOU TO KNOW: I really dig their sound.

11. Dear Rabbit- Sat. 12:35pm, Big Dipper
Love his stage persona, he has a great booming voice and I'm impressed by people who can play 2 instruments at once. (Accordion/ trumpet)

12. Chemical Lawns- Fri. 8pm, Badlander
Another of my FAV locals.

Wowie, I can't wait to see all these amazing bands and more!
See you all there!
- Mikki "internet" Lunda

Check out Kate's Top 10 for Total Fest over at Missoula Punk News and Tom "T. Money" Helgerson's Top 10 over at Weird Missoula.

(THE) DREAMSALON.... THEY LIVE INSIDE OF MY HEAD

Thankfully Dreamsalon are nothing like Cheap Trick. What they are like is one great-ass band with three dudes who've been in some of our favorite bands of the past ten or so years. Min Yee was in A-Frames, and also Le Sang Song, I think. Matt Ford was in Factums and some version of the Intelligence. Craig Chambers was in the Lights, who for years did there thing pretty quietly from Seattle, while touring with Oneida, the Obits and regularly charting on KEXP and cetera.

Dreamsalon is, in my mind at least, a continuation of Craig's post-Lights output (Le Sang Song, Love Tan and this, I think) and their 2013 LP "Thirteen Nights" made our end of year list for being so goddamn good. Dane Hansen, from whom I know about Dreamsalon, wrote a good piece for the Montana Kaimin, we're gonna include it here verbatim, because I think he captures it:

"Gothic script, gold lettering, dim lighting and tired eyes: the cover of the debut from Dreamsalon hints at some of the truisms of life in the Pacific Northwest: the winters are long, cloudy and either rainy or snowy, depending on your location. Poverty drives artists indoors, where our skin becomes pasty and our minds turn to mush, while we anxiously await easy summer living. It’s not hard to imagine some similarities between us and the Ice-Age cave painters at Lascaux, huddled away from the wet and cold for unreasonably boring, long periods. Any form of creative output becomes an exercise in retaining health and sanity.

Which is not to say that Dreamsalon remotely resembles anything healthy or sane, nor does anything from their scene. Hailing from other brain-scrambled Seattle groups like A-Frames, Factums, and the Lights, Dreamsalons’ members have honed into composing cavern-bop hits. Guitarist Craig Chambers’ signature guitar riffs seemingly work both backward and forward in a hypnotic loop, a trick he’s learned through countless hours of screwing around with home-recording, vinyl hoarding and a healthy Michael Yonkers obsession. Every tone and utterance by Chambers is run through some sort of echo-y delay, resonating into a wild, haunted feeling.

The discipline factor of Matthew Ford and Min Yee keeps things in a more recognizable garage form, albeit a grungy, repetitive one. (Ford and Chambers previous collaboration, "Love Tan" is more like noise-induced sex-mania than rock’n’roll). The two sometimes play off each other in a galloping, fool-of-fortune way, like on the dreamy, tropical tracks “In the Air,” and “Splits,” but are equally capable of setting the stage for really sinister, inky-black weirdness like the quintessential creep-out sessions “On the Bus,” and “Every Man, Woman, and Child.”