Thurston Moore's Easthampton-based indie record label Ecstatic Peace (once a neighbor of the Advocate in the vast Eastworks building) has cranked out underground gems for years. Releases by artists like Magik Markers, Awesome Color, Free Kitten and Black Helicopter have wriggled their way into the pockets of obscure American music subcultures that still exist, like cells of a resistance army in some Terminator movie, to embrace only sound and disbelieve mainstream hype. Maintaining the label is largely a labor of love; it argues that some rock stars are cool enough to give something back to the scene that made them and haven't forgotten what it's like to be blessed/cursed with difficult-to-market talents.
One member of the Ecstatic Peace team who's plenty familiar with the daily struggles of life in a rock 'n' roll band is Andrew Kesin, whose group Bob Evans toured the country in the 1990s, playing with many minor musical legends like Pavement, Firehose, Buffalo Tom and others. Bob Evans' sound is true to its time frame, evocative of both the jangle and the sludge of its contemporaries and delivering a Mascis/Watt/Malkmus wall-of-sound rhythmic assault iced with some Ten-era Eddie Vedder vocal passion. As seems so often the case, the band dissolved not long after its first major-label release, The Bradley Suite, and a farewell show at Noho's own Baystate Hotel in 1995.
Now Bob Evans has returned, bringing back its sausage rock just in time for the biggest barbecue day of the year and kicking off a four-day mini-tour of Boston, Brooklyn and Hoboken, N.J. in our humble Valley, playing most dates with EP's promising new (and local) artist Matt Krefting. The kickoff was originally slated to occur at the still-struggling, building code-plagued Flywheel, but was recently moved. Grab a fork and get your bib on."
Bob Evans plays with Guerrero, Poor Soul, Black Helicopter and the Matt Krefting Band on Thursday, June 25 at 8 p.m. at the Florence American Legion, 63 Riverside Drive, Florence. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/bobevanstheband.
