MISS LANA REBEL ALL SET FOR TOTAL FEST
No matter what venue I’m at I have a certain habit of standing in the same spot for shows. I stand just outside the main gathering of people making sure I can see the entire stage while garnering a little personal space at the same time. The last couple of times I’ve seen Miss Lana Rebel I’ve stood in my normal spot, which is also a pretty good spot to survey my fellow patrons. Each time it never fails that I see people in front of me start to immediately chatter to each other with excited “damn, she is really good!”

Former bassist for the sludged induced math-metal outfit Last of the Juanitas, Miss Lana not only traded in the bass for the guitar but traded the Melvins for Lefty Frizell and Hank Williams. Miss Lana’s shift in style has resulted in some of the most honest, dobro filled, beautiful tunes that have a Pavlovian effect on me. When I hear Miss Lana Rebel strum her first chord my brain tells me I need whiskey and I need it quick. After a couple of songs that make me feel bad about anyone whoever did me wrong Miss Lana swings into one of her barn burning, stomp your feet tunes. Which should also be about the time the bottle is empty leaving me no choice but to throw it in the air and shoot it down with my six-shooter.

TOTAL FEST: NIGHT OF JOY

Denver's Night of Joy puts to shame most of the bands that are pigeon-holed as “post-punk” – a phrase that I'm still trying to comprehend. Are we really in need of recycling this category? Seriously, we'd be better served by jettisoning the entire “post” naming fetish. Given the list of bands that typically fall under the post-punk revival umbrella, it's border line insulting to brand a band with it. NoJ – Bree Davies (Teen Pass Out) and Valerie Franz – serves up some great pop power with strong emotive vocals, sitting somewhere between soothing and caterwauling, that challenge simple record store shelving. The energy is refreshing and oddly comforting. Quick, spidery and haunting, Night of Joy brings a bundle of honest, good time, tangible DIY rock. Look out Bro Rock, this shit is asking you to do something new.

SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR: ADDED TO THE TOTAL BREW
When this August gets too hott and even the coldest ice cream won’t cool you down emerge yerself in the sweet sweet sound of Sugar Sugar Sugar.

Bellingham’s music scene sweethearts Sugar Sugar Sugar (whom I will henceforth refer to as SSS) are a three piece, one sugar for each member, fronted by two dudes who know how to rip and backed by one girl-b***h drummer who hits hard. SSS applied to Total Fest with an impressive Curriculum Vitae of bands and musicians they have played with over the years including but not limited to: Black Diamond Heavies, Pierced Arrows, Lozen, Helms Alee, The Trucks, Coconut Coolouts, Bugs, Yogoman Burning Band, The Narrows, and Lana Rebel of the Juanita Family. They are also talented enough to have played with members of The Stooges, The Minutemen, The Germs and Dead Moon. So we said “please, pour some sugar on us, your sexy blues songs and heart pumping beats are what we love to have at Total Fest”. … And it turns out hot sticky love is what they want to make you feel. They will be sure to give you the sounds of good lovin’ and hip swangin’ no matter if the lyrics break your heart or make you sweat.

Enough with the sweetness though, their sound is anything but. SSS serves you loud, hard blues tunes with an edge of grunge rock. SSS’s brand of sex-core (if I can call it that) is about more than getting some; it is about creating a corporeal experience in four dimensions.

Come to think of it, SSS may make you hotter than that melted ice cream cone so prepare to lose some layers and sweat Pabst profusely.

STREET EATERS: EAT EAT EAT.

Errrr, speaking of things we're all kinds of fanned out on, howabout John Geek's bands/projects? Freakin' Triclops! somehow a band that did the heretofore unthinkably undoable and made punk rock and prog rock at the same time. It doesn't sound like it'd be a good idea, but when Triclops! did it, it was such a good thing. Back in '08, man, when Triclops! played Total Fest VII, their set blew more minds than really anthing that year. John made crowdsurfing work, even though the music wasn't exactly what you'd call "totally conducive" to that sort of thing.

Then of course you've got the mighty Fleshies, whose blown out, strained, desperate and hopeful (and participatory) punk rock made my Show of the Year List at least two years consecutively. No other band could have a dude in cop outfit, a guitar player named Mattowar and a usually naked, spastic but extremely on-point singer. Yeah, the Fleshies, man.

Going way, way back to the second half of the nineties you've also got John's awesome S.P.A.M. label, responsible for more expand-the-horizons-of-punk-to-include-total-outsiders than any label the Bay's had before or since. Dory Tourette and the Skirtheads? Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children McNuggets? The list goes on and on and on and on.

Now, roll forward to fall of 2009: I'd gotten a promo package from a Florida punk label called Bakery Outlet, and among the stuff they sent was an EP by a band called the Street Eaters. It didn't appear particularly special until I threw it into the car stereo. Once the dude started to sing (they're a two piece, bass and drums and both sing) I knew it was John, back, with his then girlfriend now wife, Megan. It's a nice combination of punk, cute, good and fun all at the same time. Yes, I'd be the first to raise some hackles at that description, so sample it for yourself. I don't want to damn this with faint praise or anything, let's just end by saying that Street Eaters rip.

SHAHS: AYATOTAL FEST!

We at Total Fest’s mountaintop citadel-based headquarters have got a thing for one-person bands with plural names. It seems to be a winning formula. Well, actually all we can think of is Thrones... and we do like them. Missoula’s Shahs is Tom Helgerson, a transplant with a keyboard, sampler, baseball cap and a freaking fantastic knack for pulling sounds of thin air and turning them into music. It’s got a High Places-y vibe, or maybe even a warmer Suicide sort of vibe to it. But it’s really Tom’s baby and you can tell that by the spookiness, the dancing he does while playing, and seriously good time he has playing. Shahs is a band that makes songs that have more of a jaunty soundtrack vibe to them than a straight up song-only vibe. It’s an entrancing thing to witness.

Part of a two-man wave of relocated Midwesterners, the other half of which is Colin Johnson whose band is called Capricorn Vertical Slum, a Bob Pollard-styled one man rock band, Shahs and some other notable locals (Fag Rag, Skurfs, the Infernal Machine, Thug Nasties, Judgement Hammer) have busily been breathing life into Missoula’s underground rock scene for the past year or so. I first saw them at a local showcase deal at the Elks Lodge in the Fall, and was really blown away by the depth the stuff brings. I saw them about a week ago with Gay Beast and it was no less enthralling. I think you’ll dig it. We do.

ABE COLEY BRINGS DA NOISE

Abe Coley’s oft casual but enlightening shows are something of a non-secquitur in the Missoula music scene. Abe has been known to blow unsuspecting minds, both in person and on stage, playing often in his homegrown venue the BSMT that has come to foster the attention of Missoula's misbegotten musical youth/nerds. Abe was last seen playing distorto-mega-guitar through an old fender bassman with strange dexterity, manipulating fuzzboxes and knobs to create an expanding and contracting sound much akin to the inner noise of one's own brain. Look for Abe to provide a great break from the usual gimmicks of the indie rock rat race, as his noisily picked of enveloping haze storms the Total Fest gates.

KINSKI SAYS "YES-FERATU"!
I thought artistic greatness died with Klaus Kinski, but I was wrong. Kinski the band carries on the family name in style and grace, albeit with slightly less weirdness, in their hard strum psychedelic dance music. In ’07 Seattle Wah’s Kinski released Down Below It’s Chaos to reviewers who eagerly lapped up the refined sounds of experimental rock like emaciated kittens. Time Out New York’s Mikael Wood said:“Kinski’s lengthy guitar jams are meticulously designed meditations on riff and groove in which each element contributes to an overall feeling of forward motion; few rock bands muster techno’s impassive determination as confidently as this one”.

Over here at Total Fest HQ the question “Hawkwind?” is tossed about regularly and Kinski formidably answered with the 2008 release of a 7” split with Bardo Pond-a tribute to one of our favorites, Hawkwind.

By using the Scientific Method to formulate noise hypotheses and to conduct sound experiments, Kinski has arrived at a solid theory of how music should be made, simultaneously allowing "geeking-out" over successful sound experiments to be cool. I promise that Science will have you feeling their live noise reverberating through your body and tickling those taboo places inside your pants.

…Now to wait patiently for the intimacy of a Total Fest stage and a musical Kinski experience that would make Werner Herzog proud.