Gazebos Want To Be Here

Gazebos w/ Guayaba, Boyfriends, and Fabulous Downey Brothers
Chop Suey, Seattle, WA
01.12.17

Chop Suey was full of beards, multi-colored hair, tattoos, and piercings for a night of technicolor musical dreams. Seattle’s young, alternative fiends came out to see Gazebos‘ smart pop-punk with a great lineup of local precociousness for the artfully-minded set.

A last minute fill in on the lineup, the five-piece Fabulous Downey Brothers played futuristic pop compete with costumes. Donning silver heat sheets like triumphant marathon runners, along with big triangular headpieces, the band’s set was very theatrical. About halfway through they were attacked by, say, cosmic rays, sending the whole band down on the floor in dramatic convulsions. There were songs about heads in sheds and too many people on buses. And the crowd loved it.

Set to go on tour with Gazebos, feminist punk/progressive rock band Boyfriends were a lot of fun to watch. Through thick fog, lead singer Michael McKinney pranced around the stage with the mic stand. Their off-the-cuff destruction of the gender binary got the crowd dancing as they played plenty of songs with little talk to distract from the moment.

Guayaba – formerly known as Aeon Fux – delivered her Afro-Cuban hip hop sensuality with a harmonic voice that carried well through the venue. Solo on stage, she had the crowd dancing to her richly powerful tracks. Guayaba’s short set was a mix of experimental rap and supernatural salsa with plenty of soul.

Donning capes, sparkles, and a leather pilot’s cap, the foursome of Gazebos look interesting before they even begin. Happy to play the show and share stage with Fabulous Downey Brothers, who singer, Shannon Perry, has wanted to see forever, “They were perfect,” she states. The band opened with a new song “This song is about America. It’s called ‘I Don’t Want to be Here!'”

Through the heavy shroud of fog on stage, Perry, in a floral dress with huge shoulder pads and a pink fuzzy hat that matches her pink hair, delivers the clever, punk-pop anthems with fervor. The band, somewhere between glam and psych rock, dipped in new wave synth guitar, has been gaining a major local following. “That song was about gaslighting,” says Perry, and “This song is about Donald Trump, it’s going to be very, very politico.” They played plenty of new material, some for the first time, to an appreciative crowd.

Review and photos by Alex Crick

Gazebos