Bleached Playing “Hybrid Moments”

Bleached Playing “Hybrid Moments”

After M.I.A.’s headlining set concludes, I head to a venue called the North Door for a night show comprised of Hunters, Bleached, and The Men. Hunters put on a good show, and they’re a pretty visually distinctive bunch, with the contrast of a pink-haired frontwoman, a guitarist with an errant nest of dreads shooting off in all directions from his head, and a drummer who, from a distance, looks like Pornstache from Orange is the New Black. During their set, there’s a movie playing on a giant screen on one wall for no apparent reason. I couldn’t identify it but it seemed to include a young Brooke Shields and a lot of policemen. Bleached also has a pink-haired frontwoman, but in their instance the music is far too earworm-y to allow for visual distractions. Their night set — like their afternoon set before Merchandise — leans heavily on material from their recent debut Ride Your Heart, a collection of garage rock gems that flit between sugary and bristly. They also cover the Misfits’ “Hybrid Moments,” turning it on its head without the faux-male-bravado of Glenn Danzig’s bellow. Between shows the bar played “Good Vibrations” and one man got very upset when a guy didn’t wash his hands in the restroom and proceeded to tell everyone within earshot “I don’t want to touch that guy.” The Men closed the night with a ferocious set that leaned much more heavily towards their punk roots than you might’ve expected from the Americana-tinged grunge of their most recent album, New Moon. As they thrashed away, one member was relegated to playing a nearly inaudible lap-steel in the midst of the maelstrom. The whole presentation is almost enough to make you wonder if their stylistic expansion is their idea of some kind of joke.