Say Hi to the Broken Winters

Last Friday was the Broken West / Say Hi To Your Mom / The Long Winters show at the Southgate House in Newport, KY. I’d been looking forward to this show for a couple months as all three bands have been featured heavily in my music rotation recently. I coerced a couple friends into joining me and made the trip down to Newport.

Our evening started with an unplanned viewing of the 80’s classic “Weird Science” to kill some time. We hit the road with plenty of time and were amazed to see snow falling heavily (It’s APRIL folks!). Halfway to Cincinnati we decided to break for food and hit up the intriguing Dickey’s BBQ Pit, a fast-food-esque barbecue joint that was not exactly worthy of writing home about. An hour and one major traffic jam later and we were across the river, in our slack-jawed sister state of Kentucky!

The two-block walk to the Southgate House was somewhat miserable due to the frigid Arctic conditions, but we made it inside quickly and wandered down into the basement just minutes before the Broken West plugged in and switched the tubes off standby.

Their set was brief but enjoyable; I recall about 6 songs, including “Shiftee” and “On the Bubble”, two of my personal favorites off “I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On”. The crowd was still rather slim and the energy not ramped up, but the band seemed to be very glad to be there and had a great attitude on stage.

After what seemed the briefest of intermissions, Brooklyn’s simplistic electo-pop outfit Say Hi To Your Mom hit the stage. Without wasting any time they got right into one of their biggest hits, “Dimensions and Verticals”, which immediately brought the crowd to attention and kicked the energy up a few notches.

SHTYM played a decently lengthy set featuring many songs from their latest release, “Impeccable Blahs”. I was saddened to hear just a couple songs from my favorite album, “Ferocious Mopes”, but the set was still killer and a lot of fun.

We had some time to kill after SHTYM left the stage and I was ordered to photograph a couple performing the ancient art of “throw the weird neon light-thingies”. Without further ado:

It wasn’t too long before the Long Winters tuned up and switched on, and it was plain to see that they were the main attraction that evening. Personally I was there primarily for SHTYM, but I was eager to see the Long Winters in person as I’m a big fan of all their work.

It was immediately clear that they were there to have a good time and play some old-fashioned awesome indie rock, and they came out swinging with the excellent “Sky is Open”. The room’s energy soared as they played a mixture of tracks from their latest work, “Putting the Days to Bed”, as well as each of their older releases.

After a few opening tracks, frontman John Roderick opened up the set to requests and really got a good rapport going with the audience. The interaction was really fantastic, and made the difference between “just” a great performance and really memorable show. Musically, the Long Winters were amazingly tight and coordinated, and replicated the recorded versions of their upbeat indie rock songs with ease.

What further cemented the lighthearted relationship with the crowd was the fun “jams” they digressed into; they began level testing by covering Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion”, and returned to this song later in the set whilst John Roderick rapped Beastie Boy’s “Fight For Your Right” on top. When an audience member announced that it was his birthday, John declared a Birthday Blues Jam was necessary, and the group proceeded into a classic 12-bar walk with John shredding the lead. We ate it up and begged for more, and that’s exactly what we got: They played until just shy of 1 AM, and when they walked off the stage, we stood cheering, exhausted.

See ‘em all (hi res available too) here.