San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival: Tempo No Tempo, and a Sea of Angry People!

Stumbling through the hotel room with a Scanners-worthy migraine the morning after the first night of Noise Pop coverage ( read: a result of the always dependable cocktail of cheap beer, white noise, amp feedback and angry indie youth), I think I can safely say that yesterday defined insanity, most famously described by Einstein as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” After jumping in the car with the photographer, we rushed off to Slim’s, only to learn that Tempo No Tempo would be going on a bit later than the club told us originally. The management were a barking, constipated sort who insisted that my badge was fake and refused to give us a last minute +1 or even a regular ticket for Glenn’s assistant. “We’re sold out!” the guy in the box office snapped, jabbing one of his sausage-fingers at the tiny sign beside an understandably bulletproof window.

Thus Glenn’s cohort was forced to wander the small shops and liquor stores on the street until we finished. Slim’s is in a pretty ghetto area of town; fortunately she was armed with a taser and kept it at the ready if anything happened. 8 hours later it was on to The Independent for The Soundtrack of Our Lives, where both my photographer and I got the best contact high we’d ever gotten and witnessed an incredible show dominated by Nico Vega (we’ll delve more into that later). Last it was The Memory Tapes at Bottom of the Hill, where Glenn encountered some nice laid back club folk (“I’d hate to have to break that nice expensive f&%king camera of yours!” “I don’t care what magazine you’re with, I was here first!”). San Francisco’s changed since the last time I was here.

After cruising around and grabbing a coupe more drinks, we wandered back to see Tempo No Tempo. One of the coolest things about the festival has been the live, raw intensity of a lot of noise bands, and TNT was no exception, and a fine opening night introduction. I’d heard them before, found them intriguing and a nice break from the usual sort of indie noise rock to say the least but really unable to stir any serious interest. But tonight, despite a comatose crowd full of timid head-bobbers, TNT played an amazing set and finally won over some new fans, and damned if I wasn’t one of them. Tyler pointed out good-naturedly, “Hey, all you guys in the flannel– could we get ya to move up a little? There’s this moat around the stage. Don’t feel so awkward.”

No doubt TNT’s music an acquired taste, but it’s their infectious blend of melody and dissonance which sums up the chaos of a night like this and makes it all the more enjoyable: Singer Tyler McCauley is a terrific frontman, his guitar a veritable extension of his body that swings out of control around him, holding on by the strap for dear life until he snaps it back under his control. Jason Wexler is a musical dynamo, switching cooly between synth and bass like Geddy Lee (that analogy was inevitable) and without breaking a sweat, while Alex Kaiser thrashes on drums like his life depends on it. TNT was a great mixture of melody and chaos, and along with the aforementioned Nico Vega ranked as among the festival’s very best acts.