I love seeing a band “off cycle” or when they don’t have anything specific to promote. They are loose. They don’t have to focus on promoting anything. It’s when a band gets to simply be themselves on stage. I’ve probably seen Bleached more than almost any other band at this point (not to dismiss their recent Single Of The Week, of course), but this may be the first time I’ve seen them like this.
The show opened with a DJ set from Omar Perez. If you’ve ever been anywhere with speakers in the Bay Area, you’ve accidentally started dancing to him. I was half expecting a straight-up garage/punk set, but instead, it was lovely and random. We got rare soul. We got French garage. We got power pop. I think Soundhound was getting sick of me by the time the opener went on.
Next up was San Francisco’s Thank You Come Again. This was such a gritty, thick, thunderous show. It wasn’t negative when I overheard someone say, “Did I just walk into the 90s?’. This set was the kind of genre-blind rock n roll that made people love rock music again. They incorporated elements of grunge, punk, thrash, classic college radio rock, and pure Judas Priestian riff rock. Singer Izzie Clark is a dynamo of a performer and the first person to break the invisible wall of stage/audience that I’ve seen since the pandemic hit. So, yeah, I’m hoping hard she didn’t catch one of the three plagues going on, but it made for one hell of a lively show.
Alright. Bleached. Regular readers of this site are probably sick of me fawning over this band and Mika Miko before them. I do not apologize for this. This was their first headlining SF show in 6 years (according to my own personal notes), and I had been counting down the days until this show. The band has only played a very small number of shows since the end of all joy hit us in 2020- an audience-free webcast, a date opening for Bikini Kill, a couple of festival gigs, and this very short 3-date headlining tour that ended at The Chapel. Although if the band was “rusty,” they really didn’t show it.
The band did start off a little slower and more reserved than usual. Part of it may have been the Mad Alchemy Light Show that may have been a little distracting. This also was fine because we needed to get warmed up, too. It was the 4th song in the set, “For The Feel,” a non-album single that may have been missed by anyone that isn’t a hardcore fan (BTW- We really need a Bleached singles compilation. I’m really sick of flipping 45s every 3 minutes), where things started to punch up. They slowed down the first verse and stripped it down to just Singer Jen Clavin and her sister, lead guitarist Jess Clavin. The harmonies were crystal clear, delicate, and beautiful. And just when the listener was resting peacefully in the ballad version of the song, the band charged into a garage punk fury, taking the audience right along with them.
I rarely think of Bleached as a vocal group, and there’s a good chance that there was some actual vocal training during the pandemic. Or the weight of the last three years brought some renewed confidence to Jen’s singing. Either way, I was all in. The whistled harmonies for “Hard To Kill” were, for lack of a better way to describe them- OMG, AMAZING. Then they took us into a monstrous version of “Wednesday Night Melody,” complete with a feedback-heavy, almost Sonic Youthian intro, and ended with the band riffing on “Iron Man,” ending with bassist Emily Ibarra saying, “It cracks me up every time we do that.”
The second half of the set was devoted to the band’s punkier side, telling stories of the Mika Miko days and playing a lot of deep, rarely played cuts, including “Desolate City,” a song that would be a stoner rock anthem if it didn’t have so many meter and dynamic changes. They gave us early singles “Dazed” and “Think Of You.” A portion of the audience broke into a classic circle pit during these songs, which I haven’t seen at a Bleached show in, well, forever.
I’m gonna close this out with a simple, “That was beautiful. Grateful to have you back. My heart needed that.” To call out your opener this night, “Thank you. Come again!”
