Sometimes there is a show that changes your thoughts on musicians you had placed in your perfectly bottled opinions, buy treat view but maybe it was just the Friday the 13th aura lingering in the Middle East Downstairs. Resilient Bstrd, cialis buy Don Giovanni Records and Middle East Presents put together a lineup to talk about for the rest of the year with Screaming Females, Waxahatchee, Tenement and The Fagettes. This tour featuring Screaming Females, Waxahatchee, and Tenement is traveling the country to celebrate Don Gionvanni Records’ 10th anniversary in the most perfect way.
The Fagettes began the evening as the only band representing the Boston area. They hail from Cambridge, MA and are a poster child for Boston’s growing psych-garage rock niche. Moments of rockabilly retro flowed through their songs, and the crowd was already grooving by the time their set ended.
After The Fagettes, Tenement took the stage. I’ve been following Tenement and listening for a while, but this was my first chance to see them live. They didn’t disappoint. To call Tenement pop-punk could be an insult, but the way they blend the catchiness of pop with the edge of punk is perfection. My first letdown of the evening was when Tenement left the stage, only playing for about 20 minutes. Screaming Females tweeted that evening “Tenement should be headlining these shows,” and until Screaming Females took the stage, I would have agreed.
The artist quite a few people in the audience and I were most looking forward to this evening was Waxahatchee. Katie Crutchfield, formerly of PS Eliot, started Waxahatchee on her own with her bedroom debut American Weekend in 2012. It takes a lot to call such a new album a classic, but American Weekend fits that description. Her lyrics of loneliness and growing up are relatable to anyone in this generation we call “gen Y.” Her follow up, 2013’s Cerulean Salt, stayed on the same path but with slightly more defined production on the record. Fans in the audience went as wild as was socially acceptable in an indie pop environment for her older songs and sang along to her newer songs. Overall, I felt the performance itself was a bit underwhelming. I wanted more crowd interaction, more excitement to be performing for a lot of people in Boston that Crutchfield calls friends, but I felt that her heart wasn’t wholly there. It was a solid performance from her and the band with no bells and whistles.
I’ve listened to Screaming Females a few times before but never had the a-ha moment of falling for their charm until seeing them live. The energy Marissa Paternoster emits from the stage is inspiring. I noticed at the beginning of the evening, as the crowd was filing in, that there were a lot of dudes in Diarrhea Planet T-shirts. I didn’t understand the connection until Screaming Females began. Having seen both bands live, I can say that Paternoster shreds harder than all four guitarists of Diarrhea Planet combined while gyrating around the stage with no limits to where her body would slide or roll. King Mike and Jarrett Dougherty also exhibited an energy level that was only matched by Tenement earlier in the evening.
Opinions change and life moves on. If you need me, I will be blasting Screaming Females and dancing around my living room. 
