12/27: Neptune, Major Stars, Bugs and Rats @ Charlie's Kitchen in Harvard Square

It is common knowledge among promoters that the time between Christmas and New Year's Eve is a dicey time to have an event planned. Students are snuggled back into the cozy suburban nowheres from whence they issued forth in September, biding time between all the "holiday" festivities that have just started to fizzle out and the overblown, overexpensive disappointment that is every New Year's Eve... Not to mention the fact that it is generally cold as a warlock's balls.

The show I am here to tell you about, however, is in one any local promoter will tell you is an absolute slam dunk, calendrical issues be damned!!!


NEPTUNE


You see, nobody ever forgets the first time they see Neptune in concert... and that's a LOT of nobodies. Throughout several stylistic changes over their rather long reign at the top of Boston's noise-rock heap, the group have managed to sway, slam and clamor with homemade industrial implements and tense, theatrical stage presense for thousands of rabid fans from Boston to Bordeaux.

Just a scant two days after Xmas, we find them joining forces with local celebrities Major Stars, whose trajectory from instrumental wall-of-noise psych to wailing rock n' roll badassery has been well-documented locally and led to a fruitful relationship with stalwart indie label Drag City.


MAJOR STARS

Opening will be my all-time favorite Quincy-based rock group (and one of the MA's longest-held "best kept secret" bands) Bugs and Rats, in all of their sludgy, grungy fury.


CHARLIE'S KITCHEN

The show would be filled to capacity at nearly any venue you could throw at it, from Great Scott to Mass Art to the Middle East... But what better place to book such a facemelter of a three-band showcase during the collegiate diaspora known as winter break than upstairs at CHARLIE'S KITCHEN, a sweltering, overcrowded cheeseburger-joint-cum-karaoke-haunt which functions as Harvard Square's last bastion of unrepentant townieism!? Other than in the basement which once housed the HOSS, I think we all know the answer is "nowhere".

This will be a VERY crowded show, so don't be late. The bands are absolutely the type that will envelop you in sound... just as surely as the atmosphere will envelop you in a wall of hirsute, flannel-clad gentlemen and their too-cute-for-them girlfriends, and as surely as a fine bouquet of sweat, cannabis indica, spilled PBR and double cheeseburgers will envelop your lungs and nasal passages. Yeah, it's pretty much my idea of heaven, too...