On Sunday October 28th in the midst of a rash of NYC shut downs (including planes, trains and other shows) Don Pedro's provided a punk rock hideaway for people who braved the weather with an increasingly rare local performance by The Men (with a new fifth member playing a lap steel guitar!), local awesome guys Pampers, newish band The Guts and the almighty Destruction Unit (which used to be a synth punk band and is now a deset psych band).
We didn't have work the next day thanks to the storm so we decided the hell with it and rolled out to Don Pedro's to catch The Men and Pampers and check out Destruction Unit, who I'd heard but never seen.
Guts is a newer band having played just a handful of shows but they've already got a four song demo out you can hear here. They play this really slick combination of psych rock and punk similar to The Men's Open Your Heart album but stripping the songs down to these shorter versions which lean heavier to the punk end of that underground music spectrum. They have a show coming up at either 538 Johnson or The Acheron. Apparently cops have been giving Brooklyn's DIY punk space some serious shit recently forcing bands to relocate their shows.
Pampers is still awesome and still not on the internet very much which makes it very difficult to say things about them without just repeating the whole “they're awesome and you all are missing out by not seeing them perform” mantra that I keep hammering each time they play. Seriously, they're great. You can check out two songs from them here on their Jackshack Records soundcloud page. While you're there, give a listen to Call of the Wild because, Jesus people, if you don't know Call of the Wild, why do you even go to shows?
Destruction Unit used to be a synth punk band and now makes desert rock in the vein of The Men, but a bit less chaotic, I'd say. I can't say much about them because i had to bounce during their set and return, but I loved what I saw and feel like a chump for missing them earlier. Check out their music from their webpage, it good.
The Men rarely play Brooklyn which is great for them but horrible for us as they will have new songs in the can that we have to wait to hear long after others have already thrashed about to them. Last night was, I believe, the Brooklyn debut of their new fifth member who played on the lap steel guitar giving even older songs a slight twangy feel which fits in well to the direction they've been going as evidenced in Open Your Heart. This show also marked the debut of Ben Greenberg (ex Pygmy Shrews, Hubble, Zs) singing songs with The Men which didn't sound as strange as you'd think (but really it just made me miss the hell out of Pygmy Shrews, that band ruled).
