Digital Leather, Sucettes, Karen Meat and the Computer at O’Leaver’s 8/19
Digital Leather
Sucettes
Following the dissolution of his former band, Box Elders, Jeremiah McIntyre spent the years surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar living in San Francisco. By night, taxiing crackheads, tech slime, and vomiting princesses through the dark streets of a city quickly becoming the bloated corpse of its delusive bohemian salad days. By day, laying in wait while composing pop perfection for nobody and no one. Finally pushed out of the Bay, along with so many others of his kind, he packed up his satchel of deserted melodies and returned to his longtime home of Omaha, Nebraska.
Once back in Omaha he encountered Francophile and convent drop-out Genie Molkentine along with her partner in life, as well as the band Killer Blow, Todd Von Stup. Genie’s European sensibilities and the nihilistic din of Todd’s guitar added contradictory layers of saccharine and murk to McIntyre’s songs. Former Box Elders drummer and Russian one-madman-band, Dave Goldberg, brought the lexicon of R&B and virtuosic punishment of the keyboards and cocktail kit into the mix. Guitarist C.J. Olson was brought in largely to provide a counterbalance to Jeremiah’s height and a tasteful level of slop to solos. The five came to call themselves Sucettes.
Sucettes deconstruct music in a way that’s not simple to communicate. Maybe there’d be a word for it if Buddy Holly had lived to collaborate with Françoise Hardy, while under the care of Dr. Leary. Maybe you could find something similar while driving through the desert, your car radio stuck between two AM stations, one playing Bobby Fuller and the other playing France Gall. Mutated pop music that bubbled up from the middle of America, but comes from no particular time or place.
Karen Meat and the Computer
Karen Meat is a pop rock project of Arin Eaton based between Des Moines and Iowa City. The band itself is a moody character, a sequined oversized sweater, crooning melodies and lyrics of a bored generation. She’s Drunk Like The Rest Of Us, Karen Meat’s recent November 2016 tape release, steers away from her DSM band (Brad Turk, John Huffman) as Eaton collaborates with her business partner Dana Telsrow. Karen Meat glitters with memorable beats, 60s-girl-pop inspired vocals, guitar solos by Dana, and coordinated outfits. Full band Karen Meat includes releases such as On The Couch (2016), and self-titled Karen Meat & The Computer (2015) – grumpy rock n’ roll songs with a tinge of partying and omnicord, with titles like “Who Cares?” and “Pizza and Beer”. Realistically, pop songs should be fun AND sad. Karen Meat embraces the power of rejection and depression as themes for her music, and her upbeat tunes are gems of sarcasm and truth. Follow Karen Meat on Twitter at @K_Meat for more declarations on how weird the world can seem.
