When exactly did the church behind the GoBar start charging for parking? Had to park three blocks away just to make it to the Tunabunny show last night, and only three cars even bothered using the goddamned (or it it 'godblessed'?) lot. Hope the Christians enjoy their extra fifteen dollars of income.
The whole sad waste made me feel like grabbing the nearest rock and shattering one of their tax-free stained-glass windows, but seeing Tunabunny made me glad I left those windows alone.
The bass player couldn’t decide whether he wanted to stand up or sit down. The drummer couldn’t decide if it was appropriate to use her cymbals. And the two singers couldn’t decide if they wanted to win the audience over with kindness or bash them into submission with feedback. Within thirty seconds of their first song, Tunabunny is already beyond several thousand conventions in local Athens band music. Two females (girls? Women? Babes? Chicks?) playing electric guitars? Using a synthesizer for percussion? One singer using her guitar as a hammer against her microphone stand, against the drumset, against the other singer’s guitar? And the other singer using her voice to try and shatter the windows of the bar, if not the vacant looks on the faces all around her?
With most bands, figuring out their sound is as simple as figuring out which store they came out of at the mall. Oh, that band must have gone to the alt-country store. Hey, that band must have gone to the smooth indie-rock store. But Tunabunny is a completely different animal. They seem to have gone to the mall just to pinch the mall cops and try to escape, or to beat up little kids in the arcade and take away their quarters. The kind of band who went to the mall and just decided to drift.
Tunabunny is a confusing mix of accessibility and incomprehension. A band that giggles when things aren’t going well, but inadvertently bumps into each other when they are. A band that one minute seems about to invent a new language for music, but in the next seems content to stroll through the same parks and gardens that invented them. Even at their weirdest, they still want to be loved. But even at their most conventional, they manage to sound otherworldly. In retrospect, it all seems so simple—two guitars, bass, drums, an occasional keyboard—but I can’t for the life of me tell you what they sound like or what exactly they are trying to accomplish. In the sense that it could have fallen apart at any moment—that any one person in the group may have decided to say fuck it and just walk off the stage forever—it was one of the worst shows I’ve ever seen. But considering that I couldn’t look away, that my bladder was full and cramping by the third song and I never once considered heading to the bathroom until they had finished, in that sense it was one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time.
And I can’t wait to see what they try to do next.
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