Ramma Lamma
While it occupies an ideal location for a cozy neighborhood watering hole, Circle-A Café, logistically speaking, seems like an unlikely spot for live music. Extremely tight on space, lacking a stage and situated on a quiet, mostly residential side street, the place has serious limitations from a promoter’s point of view, but for concertgoers, those problems are actually positives in disguise. The fact that it’s tiny only makes it more intimate and immediate, and if things have to end early to avoid angering the rest of the block, that just means less filler and less time wasted standing around waiting for said filler to start. The result is events like this, highly concentrated doses of music that provide all the enjoyment of a normal show, but still get you home at a reasonable hour.
Getting tonight’s particularly punchy installment of the venue’s adventurous “Alive at 8” series underway was entertaining Twin Cities punk outfit Color TV, who may be a relatively new name on the scene, with little material available online save for a short, remarkably polished set of demos, but make a strong statement nevertheless. There weren’t all that many people there to see them unfortunately, probably because the insanely busy, almost overstuffed weekend left the entirety of Riverwest nursing a collective hangover, but that really didn’t seem to dampen the band’s considerable spirits in the slightest. In fact, while the turnout was disappointingly minimal, topping out at perhaps a dozen paying customers, their tuneful but still aggressive brand of unfiltered rock ’n’ roll found a very receptive audience among those locals well-rested enough to attend.
The short break following Color TV’s taut, 20-minute set saw a few more stragglers come through the door, but not so many that the space felt crowded, even for Circle-A’s little hole in the wall. Though, being another indication of area exhaustion, that shouldn’t reflect poorly on cartoonishly scuzzy headliners Ramma Lamma, who are still riding high from the warm reception of their latest LP, Ice Cream, but nonetheless used the opportunity to show off a sizable lot of new material. Live, those songs are still somewhat rough around the edges, but are as invigorating as most of the familiar cuts heard alongside them, such as the raunchy “Wet Denim” or the unrelentingly rocking closer “Buzzkill.” All told it was short but substantially sweet, just like most shows at this unassuming Milwaukee institution.
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