Yesterday night after Laurie Anderson’s record release party I had dinner with some friends and some new people, one of whom was this nice cool dude from Alaska who dresses like a rock star and has jokes and opinions about everything. Gabe (was his name) told me his band would perform the following midnight at the East Village rock’n’roll glamour striped-ceiling venue called Ella. The band (Dog Soldier) is a high energy quartet. They are kind of hard to describe but are a bit of a mixture of seveties rock, irish/british punk and metal. Gabe with his ripped shirt (at least while he actually had it on), low jeans, leather boots, blue eyes, thick beard and long blonde weavy hair looks like Zakk Wylde meets Chris Robinson and is a magnet for grabby groupies (most of the crowd tonight). His energetic stage presence and punk moshpit attitude reminded me of Iggy Pop but his voice is growly like Lemmy’s or Billy Gibbons’. Some of the band’s choirs sounded almost like the faster episodes of Type O Negative, but when they went all Irish on the crowd they echoed Dropkick Murphy’s… Other times thy sounded a bit like Big Elf or the Damned. Or was it just their looks? Who knows. What matters is I had planned to stay a few songs to check them out but ended up staying the whole show. They are a riot to watch! They have another gig next week at Roseland and then they are off for a few months on tour so catch them in town while you can.
I turned out to be an eventful night which included an industry party on a west side rooftop, a nice dinner and a movie, so adding a concert to top that all off made perfect sense to me, a real NYC night out! I love this town!