Lost Babies Found At Bovine Sex Club/Roller Derby Event
Written by Jason Daniel Baker
Sunday, 04 March 2012 04:30
If I told you I had been in attendance at a fundraiser for The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad inside a place called ‘The Bovine Sex Club’ you might well wonder first whether I need to be fitted for a giggle-jacket and second what it has to do with rock ‘n’ roll.
First off, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad is the nickname for the traveling farm team of my beloved Toronto Roller Derby League and they were raising money to subsidize road trips to compete in different cities.
Second, ‘The Bovine Sex Club’ has never hosted any zoophiliac phenomena. The club (one in operation for over twenty years on the Toronto scene) is just a venue like several others on the Queen Street West strip in my city that features high-quality rock bands. The name of it is what passes for humor – the high-brow, risque kind Toronto is known for.
As for what it has to do with rock ‘n’ roll the evening’s proceedings featured performances by two local bands – The Lost Babies and The Crashing Cars. The first was a pretty munificent example of high octane, kick-ass neo-punk. The second gave a power-punk set so brisk as to leave little to digest or mention.
The Lost Babies opened things up with an old school punk aural firestorm. Featuring a singer who looks like she could be Mick Jagger’s long-lost lovechild with Jeri Ryan, and a flamboyant Japanese guitarist sporting a Jimi Hendrix-style afro you could say they embrace showmanship.
The posing and miming they do on stage could literally knock your beer over especially since “on stage” can mean right out into the audience which is where their singer Valerie Messy, a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, often takes her performance.
Writhing on the floor, slithering against her microphone stand, straddling the railing in front of the monitors…She’ll have some bruises after this show.
Some of her vocal stylings embrace a spoken-word/Patti Smith feel. Other times she shrieks, snarls then sings melodically. The vocalising is like her antics on stage – you never know what she might do next. Sometimes you even wonder if she does. The approach is bold but the performer seems equal to it.
Their Tokyo-born axeman Mamoru Anzai and I got to chatting before the set. He said their sound had been likened to ‘New York Punk’. I actually found it to be more in line with Detroit punk – Iggy & the Stooges/MC5 etc. At times it veered off into a more ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers’ vibe. This is a band that has found its sound as well as several others in terrific compositions like ‘Sweeter’, ‘Cobalt B’ and ‘Really?’.
As I’m sure the reader can imagine the hard-partying roller derby team in attendance was both appreciative and demonstrative. When it comes to whom you attend a show alongside, with women nick-named ‘Zom-Boney’ or ‘Knock Turn’ you can’t go wrong.
Still, I can’t help feeling wistful about the area around the venue. The Bovine is but a stone’s throw away from ‘The Big Bop’ – a legendary venue shutdown a few years ago and turned into a furniture store in keeping with a ‘gentrification’ project in the area leaving for fewer places to see bands.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Lost-Babies/171292402967144
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Deadly-Viper-Assassination-Squad-D-VAS/153822261300237
[Photo kudos to Sydney Abram & Mark Tym]