Photo credit: Andrew Feller
Match Stick
It’s not nearly as sprawling and chaotic, and it doesn't offer any barbecue, but if you’ve never been to Austin’s South by Southwest music festival and wondered what it’s like, you could get a pretty decent sense at Milwaukee’s annual Arte Para Todos festival. A fundraiser for school arts programs, the event is structured as a four-day concert crawl, with each day spotlighting in a different neighborhood. Just like at SXSW, each venue’s lineup features a hodge-podge of performers you’re unlikely to see on the same bill together anywhere else, so even if you just plant yourself at one place for the night you're bound to see something surprising. But part of the fun is bouncing from venue to venue, seeing where the night takes you.
Once again this year the festival kicked off in Walker’s Point, perhaps Milwaukee’s most underrated live music neighborhood, and once again there was a brand new venue on the lineup: The Cooperage, the cavernous backroom of Boone & Crockett’s new location at 822 S. Water St. My night, however, started at Var Gallery, where Hii Tribe rapper King Myles was finishing up an affable set of everyman party rap for a small but charmed crowd. Following a set break that gave the crowd time to scope out the gallery’s annual marquee 30x30x30 exhibition—which featured some of its most creative displays yet (don’t miss the one with all the explicit Craigslist personals)—the jazzy R&B duo Two Tones calmed the crowd with their juxtaposition of heavenly soft vocals and showy electric bass. They used their minimal setup to maximum effect.
Two Tones
Over at Anodyne Coffee, Girls Rock Milwaukee alums Negative/Positive were warming the stage for a bill that would include powerhouse singer Siren and rapper Zed Kenzo. It’s hard to think of a local band with more good will than the teen trio, who are slowly but surely maturing into the city’s best riot grrrl band. They delivered their peppy songs about impractical jeans, vapid pop songs and fake friends with a spot-on combination of sass, humor and indignation.
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The jazz-fusion quartet Match Stick had the honor of christening the stage at The Cooperage as the first performers at the venue on its opening night. The space is little changed from its Wherehouse days, but it’s a hell of a venue: big and open, redolent with walls of exposed brick and a tall stage with great sight lines. And the sound system is incredible, though I suspect the quartet would sound pretty fantastic anywhere they performed. With their pyrotechnic tangles of vibraphone and electric guitar, they took home the night’s “damn, I really wish I had more time to stick around and watch the rest of this set” award.
Sex Scenes
But I have no regrets about heading over to The Local, where the garage-punk savages Sex Scenes ripped through their set of beastly scuzz, backed by the night’s hardest working fog machine. They killed it, and their speediness paid off: They finished just in time to catch the final two minutes of the Bucks’ game 6 victory. Sex Scene's ceaseless performance was karmically offset by the next act, chatty joke rockers Crappy Dracula 2, who offered about two or three minutes of stage banter for every minute or so of music. As always, they bombed with relish. After all these years they’re still an acquired taste you probably have to be a member of the band to acquire.
Cairns
My night ended with a pair of destination headliners at Gibraltar. Cairns’ blissful dream-pop was spiked with soft and loud extremes and weird, loungy digressions. Imagine Yo La Tengo, if Yo La Tengo had a flutist. Their set felt simultaneously unfinished yet assured, a performance from a band that probably won’t look or sound the same a year or two from now, but has settled on something pretty special for the time being.
As a general rule second acts are never as satisfying as the first ones, but that’s not the case for Dramatic Lovers, the loose reincarnation of one of the great Milwaukee indie-rock band of the ’00s, Decibully. The group’s new songs are every bit as feverish and dynamic as those they used to play as Decibully, a flood of motion and creativity. If anything, though, age has only made their music more pointed—their set was faster, heavier and more ceaselessly intense than the ones they used to play back in the day. It made for an eventful finale to a very generous night of music.
Dramatic Lovers
Arte Para Todos continues through Sunday. Tickets and more information are available at the festival’s website.
