Preview: Date Auction ft. Giant Claw, Brat Curse, Sweet Lil' / February 13 / Club Underground
By Megan Fair, Copy Chief
Club Underground / Friday, February 13, 2015
What happens when you combine the exciting music of Giant Claw, Brat Curse and Sweet Lil’ with the auctioning off of prizes donated from everyone’s favorite local businesses? You get Date Auction 2015 at Club Underground, a night destined to be full of debauchery, laughter and captivating music.
Date Auction is an ACRN tradition in which the music collective auctions off donations from beloved local businesses to fundraise for their annual free music festival, Lobsterfest. This year ACRN will be auctioning off prizes from O’Bettys, Fluff Eatery, Haffa’s Records, Wings Over Athens, Aveda, Blue Eagle Music, Union Street Diner and Import House. We’ll also be auctioning off four tickets to Indie Fest, whose headliner is the Academy Award Winner Juicy J.
As always the bidding will be a ridiculous cacophony of friends and strangers vying for the coolest prizes and their favorite people. But not only is this night about fundraising for Lobsterfest, it’s also about experiencing a wide variety of memorable music
Sweet Lil’ is a new Athens duo comprised of Hannah Cook and Harold Bon. Date Auction will be Sweet Lil’s third show. While Cook said that she’s not quite confident onstage yet, the duo’s energy is lighthearted between songs, full of silly jokes and banter. The songs of Sweet Lil’ are adaptations of music that Cook has previously recorded solo and brought to Bon. While Bon and Cook are both excited to play, Cook is especially looking forward to the event. “[Date Auction] is very nostalgic for me because I was in ACRN, and I attended those, and they were a ton of fun,” said Cook, also sharing a story of the year she kept outbidding herself. The duo’s stormy, captivating indie rock is a refreshing addition to the current musical landscape of Athens.
Brat Curse, whose name originated from the title of a Giant Claw song, hail from Columbus. The four-piece’s sound is a noisy mix of indie rock and punk, and its energetic self-titled release is comprised of songs that the band spent a year playing live. The band only recently became a four-piece with the addition of Mickey.
“[Mickey] played a Guided By Voices tribute show with us and it ended up being a lot of fun. When we showed her some of our songs she shredded them so hard that it would have been stupid of us not to get her on the team,” said Justin Baker.
If you’ve already heard the self-titled and are hungry for more, Brat Curse recorded two songs for a three-way-split with Awful Nothings and Sega Genocide that is to be on cassette in the coming months. The group is also working on songs for their second record, which it hopes will be released this summer.
The band doesn’t have particularly strong feelings on Valentine’s Day. However, as Baker explained, “When the clock strikes Midnight at the Club Underground on Valentine’s Eve, Brat Curse will be grateful to be in each other’s presence, at a show, doing what we love, and we will embrace each other tenderly.” Can you really afford to miss such a picturesque image? Not to mention, Baker clued us in some possible fireworks.
“I have always had feelings for Chris that can’t be explained, maybe I will find the courage to let him know this year. I hope it plays out in my head exactly as I have seen it in my head for all these years.”
Giant Claw, also from Columbus, has been creating sound collages and visual art for years now, and Keith Rankin’s latest release DARK WEB is a deep, audio-philosophical journey to try and explain how the Internet age and being online has changed our sense of self. “In the way that we register major and minor keys in music, maybe we also register memes or other coded non-musical information hearing the music too,” said Rankin, explaining his calculated use of samples from specific time periods.
DARK WEB was released in various formats by the Japanese label Virgin Babylon, who reached out to Rankin out of the blue. “I think my albums have always been a bit better received in Japan,” said Rankin. He has plans to tour Japan in August. The brain behind Giant Claw knew his record reached beyond the usual crowd of friends and peers when people were trashing the album on 4chan.
Club Underground, a newer venue in the basement of 14 N. Court St., will welcome show goers at 10 p.m. Date Auction costs $3 to attend, and bring cash to bid on all the hot ACRN dates.
