Lucky Bar show: The Kill Rats, Start With The Cobra (#live #local band & venue review)
I was excited about this show for a month because my TKR vinyl is honestly one of the coolest and most beautiful things I own. (You should buy one too, I won’t tell your mom.)
This band singlehandedly got me into collecting new punk vinyls and invigorated me about the current BC music scene. I don’t even know how I found them now, which is a shame. What a mystery 🤔
I couldn’t sell you on them by talking if they can’t sell you on them by rocking so without further preamble, here’s the show footage:
Kind of an abrupt cut at the end but I didn’t have a tripod so this was working me out a bit 😅🤫
☆
I’m going to interject the venue review here in the middle of the band reviews; imagine you’re there, between sets, looking around to fully take the place in for the first time.
Can you see the giant column of bottles of red and green Screech? [The rest of this paragraph is a meandering personal anecdote, please be advised.] Red Screech was the first thing I ever bought at a liquor store after turning legal age, I didn’t know what to buy so I asked the clerk, who happened to be The Cool Girl from my 5th grade class (named Vanessa, even), and she smirked as kindly as possible because of the residual learned acceptance of what a loser I am, and told me to get a mickie of Screech. I think I took two sips and left it on a shelf for 3 years before aggressively throwing it in some abomination cocktail during undergrad. Seeing Screech in stores or now, at Lucky as decor, I’m always reminded of that one time in the otherwise long-forgotten private liquor sales vestibule of a paradoxically economically impervious pub near my parents’ place. And the Screech branding is totally unchanged since that incident (in 2005), so it seems wildly anachronistic to me, moreso every time I see it, really. But I guess it’s going strong? Because Lucky is an absolutely institutional Victoria bar, and they’re leaning pretty hard into Screech-as-aesthetic choice. Maybe its got “oldschool” charm by now 😂
Lucky’s very classic in its way, reminds me of a somewhat more cheugy version of Bovine Sex Club in Toronto. It’s as filthy as an exceptionally clean venue doubling as a yuppie “dive” themed bar tends to be, ie its kind of deeply sanitized seeming for all that the lights are low. This was a second date for me and my now-girlfriend and I suspect that this place isn’t really a bookish gal’s cup of tea–but a cool one like the one dating me, might see a loudly moodlit, noisy bar as your natural habitat and be very sweet about how you dragged her there. I think my earnest enthusiasm for the band of old punks from the interior dressed as mutated scientist ratmen helped, plus I casually didn’t drink which is a smart & cute thing to do sometimes around the start of a relationship…particularly if you’re actually a mess but you want to seem like a fun mess instead of an out of control trainwreck mess with imminent liverdeath issues for her to end up grieving. Unrelatedly, we each paid for ourselves and she had a cider, to prove that she’s fun too and not the sobriety police (I drank two pints at lunch on our first date and got faintly silly off it while she stayed entirely sober…we had a lovely time but it sort of set a funny precedent we were both responding to on the next date).
Sorry I can’t tell you what the bathrooms are like or how to get to them, as noted I wasn’t drinking. I am actually a 🐫 when sober. Let me ask my gf and get back to you. Eta: they were forgettable, because she forgot entirely what they were like.
Do they have a bar menu? We didn’t eat: the booths feel too small and dim, place is too crowded for table service on a show night.
☆
Back to the music: Start With The Cobra were actually pretty good, which surprised me because I had sort of sized them up wrong for looking kind of ironicbilly and cranky-faded (faded-cranky? It’s like being hangry but the opposite, more like fullgry) while they’d stood for TKR.
I wish I had gotten a video of the singer explaining that “start with the cobra” is a fisting technique. He gestured to demonstrate, and looked incidentally bit like salt bae doing his salt thang. I think you get it. I gained a lot of respect for them as a band in that moment so to honor that I’ve painstakingly uploaded ALL the clips of them I did get.
The first one, I can’t recommend unless you’re some kind of superfan, it’s just them killing time on stage waiting for lightening to strike or something.
Off to a decent start finally, they’re playing a little loose together but I like the singer’s sloppycore rizz.
They’re still warming up at this point, yeah? Is their frontman really that faded or is it just stagesona? The thetans of rock seem to have him acting some type of way, for sure.
This is when you can really tell they’re packing heat.
The headliners aren’t included in this review because they played about one song before my gf and I looked at eachother and said “you hate unironic cockrock too, right? Amazing, let’s bounce.” Now that’s romance 🤌
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