The Nadas preview

The Nadas
Schubas, Chicago
Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Have you ever gorged on too much of something, a certain snack or drink, resulting in vomiting said something, resulting in not being able to eat/drink said something for a long time after? When I was a kid I did it with nacho cheese Doritos — couldn’t eat ’em for years. Still can’t have tequila after one magnificent high-school display of idiocy. In college, the musical equivalent of Doritos for me was The Nadas.

The Nadas made many Saturday nights of drinking miserable for me. I spent a considerable amount of my weekends during my sophomore year of college avoiding my dorm by drinking rum and Coke at a friend’s off-campus apartment. She had three female roommates, and boy did they looooooove The Nadas. So much so that on any given Saturday night, I had the opportunity to listen to one Nadas record — always the same f’ing one — roughly 20 times in a row. It felt like 80.

So the hesitancy to revisit The Nadas for this “Stage Buzz” didn’t stem from disliking their music as much as it did the severe overexposure I suffered back then. Nonetheless, it helped overcome my fear that The Nadas on Ghosts Inside These Halls (Authentic) aren’t the same Nadas that probably still haunt the halls of Sara’s old apartment. Those Nadas were a much poppier bunch, specializing in breezy, infectious, mostly acoustic tunes that surely said “Play me at your sorority house” if you played them backwards. The band hit their target, though, because they were huge in the college scene across the country (Playboy named them “The Best College Band You’ve Never Heard Of” in 2001). The Inside These Halls Nadas are much rootsier, even tumbling into alt-country territory on songs like “No Thank You,” “Alaska,” and “Hammer Down.” Even on catchier tunes like “Loser” and “Feel Like Home,” the central Iowans don’t blatantly pander to modern rock radio like they did seven years ago — probably a product of the band’s two main tunesmiths, Mike Butterworth and Jason Walsmith, writings songs together as a team on this record — a first for the duo.

You probably won’t see me in the front row of Schubas Tuesday night, but I just might be able to put this record on at home. Baby steps.

Ash Avenue open.

– Trevor Fisher

Click here for streaming Nadas samples.

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly