When I wrote my other “Scene Report” the title was (like most things) an inside joke with myself. First off “scene” is a bit of a cringe term for me and like what right would I have to report on anything remotely considered a scene?
Plus, I don’t want to be that guy who makes you watch my grainy iPhone concert footage. Is that not what Instagram stories are for?
Yet it’s also on brand for me to double down on my dumb joke and keep the Scene Report name going. So here we are.
Over the years I’ve fallen out of the habit of going to live shows, partly due to a worldwide pandemic and partly due to my desire to be a lazybones. In an attempt to offset this, I bought tickets to 4 concerts in the beginning of the year. I was hopeful yet skeptical that I would go to all of them. In the back of my mind I was ready to bail out of any one of them with the excuse that at least the band would still get some money. Now that everyone thinks music is costs nothing I am happy to throw money towards an artist in anyway I can.
Three of these tickets were for shows in Santa Cruz while one of them was in San Francisco. A younger me never batted an eye at jumping in the car after work and doing the whole SF concert thing and then returning home in the wee hours only to head on back to work in the morning like no big deal. These days? Full on lazybones. Like sometimes going to the store or meeting a friend for a beer after work sounds too hard.
But you know what? People can change. So at 5:06 on a Tuesday I got in my car and headed up the coast towards not only Cafe Du Nord but also Gherkins Sandwich Shop... which is most famous for being the place that we got sandwiches after Silas and I bought our pinball machine. It also seemed like as good a place as any to get dinner.
I was going to eat my Herbivore Special at the shop but when the sandwich came it was packaged to go. Perhaps dude was telling me to beat it but I took this as a sign to find a place with a view and check this shit out!
Maybe my scene reports should focus on the sandwich scene? Are blurry sandwich photos better than blurry concert footage? Honestly they’re probably about equal. Like if you had to choose between “hey checkout this sandwich I ate yesterday” or “checkout this 30 second clip of a show I went to” clearly the best option is to walk away.
Anyways I ate my sandwich and drove into San Francisco and toward Cafe Du Nord, a venue that I thought I might have been to before but turns out no.
I guess here is where I should talk about the band more and why it was important for me to go to this.
Brigitte Calls Me Baby is a band that I discovered from the “New Releases For You” section of my Apple Music. It’s not an area I check often. It’s not that I’m against it, but, there is something about robots and the ghost of Steve Jobs telling what they think I might enjoy. Still from time to time I check it out.
On this particular day I was walking my dog and my podcast finished when I was about 15 minutes away from my house. Not enough time to overthink what I want to listen to next and yet an eternity to be alone with my thoughts. So I hit up the new releases zone and saw Brigette Calls Me Baby’s “This House is Made of Corners” EP. I turned it on and kept walking.
Three quarters of the way through the first song I had to stop and be like ‘what the fuck is this???’…
It’s impossible for me to talk through this without talking about Morrissey. If you’ve you known me for awhile you will likely know that I was hard ‘ride or die’ for Moz since around the age of 17. And if you’ve known me for quite some time then you’ll know that I haven’t listened to dude in years.
So I’m standing on a sidewalk in the middle of my dog walk super confused about how much this music ‘is giving’ Morrissey without being performed by the sack of shit that is Morrissey.
I don’t love that those were my first thoughts, but, sometimes these Scene Reports cut right to the bone.
Then when you see a picture of the band you’re like holy shit there are major Morrissey vibes and the rest of the band look cool as fuck too.
Now I hate that I’m focusing on aesthetics but when you couple all that with their songs it’s almost too much to deal with. I saw an interview with the singer where the interviewer gently wondered if they were an AI generated band. When he asked this I nodded along while on tenterhooks awaiting the answer.
“This House Is Made Of Corners” instantly found its way into heavy rotation in my house. Silas is a fan. I want them to be the biggest band in the world while simultaneously never changing.
It is this enthusiasm that got this lazybones to drive up to San Francisco on a Tuesday.
The show was a delight. I saw a group of young kids who had all bought merch of the opening band secure their place up front. I watched a woman older than me FaceTime her friend mid-show. They turned the disco ball on. The vibes… were tight.
Ok fine… I’ll show you that blurry concert footage.
Songs by Brigitte Calls Me Baby can be found on Get In Loser and Over/Under Thinking 2023.
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