Friday Night: Davey Crockett, Muhammadali And The Mahas In The Heights

Photos by Marc Brubaker

Davey Crockett

​Davey Crockett, Muhammadali, the Mahas
"Awesome Street Gallery"
July 30, 2010

It had been a while since Aftermath had been to an old-fashioned house show, but not for our lack of admiration of these most DIY ventures. So on Friday evening, we headed over to the former Blossom Street Gallery behind Kicks in the Heights.

We arrived to the so-called "Awesome Street Gallery" to find a crew of 30 or so mostly familiar faces, which was not terribly surprising. Shortly after popping the cap on our oversized Shiner, Aftermath was disheartened to hear that Weird Party had dropped off the bill because of some confusion about the date. Their replacements happened to be three-piece Muhammidali, who are about to head out on tour. We chatted outside until the music started, and everyone piled inside to catch the set.

House shows are an intriguing beast: the atmosphere is almost always great, but the sound is often far from optimal. More often than not you have a band performing in one room (the living room, in this case), whilst everyone else has crowded around the band, suffocating the entrance from the next room, and craning their necks to see the band in any way.

But despite the cloud of humidity generated by between 30 and 40 people in a small space, the camaraderie makes up for a lot of the detractions.

Muhammidali

​Muhammidali launched into their set with a long instrumental, enticing head-bobbing from much of the crowd (Aftermath included). There's a running joke in the Houston scene about how often the band plays; not only were they a late edition to this show, but also they picked up Yppah's slot at the Hater showcase at Walter's later in the night. The nice thing about their frequent appearances, however, is that the band has their sound down on lock, and they've gotten pretty darn tight as a group.

Their third song had a riff that we swore came straight from Andrew WK's vault, and the band plowed through a couple more while Aftermath pondered the following: just why was anime, featuring humanoid cats, playing on the television? Around the moment we started looking around in delirium because the room was as hot as Wesley Willis' crotch, we noticed that Johnny Patrick was taping the set.

Everyone spilled outside for the break, puffing smokes and trying not to think about the heat while The Mahas set up their gear. This was the first time that we'd seen the Scott Snot-led group since we caught their debut at The Mink last December. After pulling a mulligan on the first song due to tuning, Snot announced they were using the show as practice.

The band would go on to play a warehouse party later that night - at 5 a.m., according to our Rocks Off bretheren.