Bloomington act The Coke Dares kicked off their upcoming tour with a show at Fester’s House of Blooze on Friday night that included more than 60 songs, non-sequitur jokes about the presidential election candidates and lots of stage energy.
The show, in addition to kicking off the tour they are about to leave for – “7 or 8 months” long, they said – the show was also a CD release party for their album Feelin’ Up, which came out July 8. The band played two sets: one to start off the evening where they played all the songs from their 2005 debut album Here We Go With … The Coke Dares, and the second in which they played all the songs from their new album.
Although the sets combined amounted to more than 60 songs, each set was only about 30 minutes long. Punk act The Touchists played between their sets, Lord Fyre’s Sound System spun records between everyone’s sets, and the band WESH (another of The Coke Dares’ members’ many projects) played after the Dares.
The night got off to a slow start, in typical bar-show fashion, with only a few people in the crowd for The Coke Dares’ first set. The energy was low and the songs from their first album weren’t as muscular as their new material, but they made the best of the set by joking around.
“If you could not clap or pay attention, we’d like to get used to what it’s like to be on tour,” vocalist and guitarist Dr. History Doctor said between two of the songs in their first set.
As bassist Skye Myles promised during the first set, however, the band had warmed up by their second lap and put on a raucous, audience-friendly show. They filled the space between their songs with jokes on topics that ranged from the presidential candidates’ views on condoms vs. the pullout method, to rap-metal musicianship (“You also gotta respect Korn. Those guys really know how to use ProTools”), to their apparent Portuguese fan base.
Before the show, Dr. History Doctor explained that, although the band had never played in Portugal, they had found a Portuguese review of one of their albums.
“I don’t read Portuguese, but when we translated the page, it said something like, ‘You will discard of this record immediately.’ ‘Another example of North American power trio looking stupid,’” Doctor said.
“We’re pretty sure it was just mistranslated,” Skye Myles responded.
The
band put lots of force and stage energy into its short punk songs on topics
such as meth labs, sleeping in Wal-Marts and satellite space stations.
The venue’s acoustics made it difficult to make out what they were singing about at times, and the bar crowd was aloof until near the end. But once the band got on their feet, they put on a solid show of fast rock ‘n’ roll and kept the audience hanging out to see what bizarre comments they would make next.
