Two Cow Garage live!
Two Cow Garage
The Hideout, Chicago
Thursday, May 17, 2007
For the rusted-out, ’85 Camaro of a band they are, Two Cow Garage still packed a brass-knuckled punch at a packed Hideout on Thursday. Micah Schnabel’s perpetually hoarse, steel-wool howl scraped through the layers of guitar while drummer Dustin Harigle pounded the dusty rug of his benign existence.
Schnabel’s lyrics were hardly so metaphorical, chronicling white-trash malaise in language as plain as his opening words, “I shoulda gone to college.” Instead of the scampish or libidinous exploits of immediate influences The Replacements and Guns N’ Roses, on their third album (Three on Shelterhouse) Two Cow have already condemned themselves to let life pass by. In concert the fury in their high-octane bar rock rarely had a motive (such as “We gotta get out of this place”) and they didn’t deal in Drive-By Truckers’ vicious-circle-of-life poetics. If it wasn’t anger at the state of things, it was pissed-off, “what a fucking mess” bemusement.
Schnabel’s redneck Nirvana was able to be unsettled bassist Shane Sweeney, whose “Now I Know” took boozy Stones rock and spilled all over the rug. A violent cover of The Beatles’ “Oh! Darling” replaced their too-obvious version of “Don’t Let Me Down,” showing how even when approaching the world’s most melodic band they can only find grip on the fringes.
During “No Shame,” Schnabel sang about throwing the rock ‘n’ roll dream away and cursing his guitar for ever bringing it up. Despite forecasting their imminent demise, however, the band’s performance was tighter than it has been in the past. It presents them with a catch-22: Are they experienced enough now to do it right, or to know there’s no future in it? “Alphabet City” and “Come Back To Shelby” debated this point, raging at their own lack of sophistication while finally understanding the differences between Romeo and Juliet and Jack and Diane.
Success is almost excatly what Two Cow Garage don’t need. They can’t afford to lose having nothing to lose.
— Steve Forstneger
Category: Live Reviews, Weekly
