reCAP :: Big Head Todd and The Monsters with Mike Doughty w/ Fred Norris Band ::2016.02.12
Big Head Todd and the Monsters formed among high school buddies in Colorado in 1986, and 30 years later -- yes, Big Head Todd is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year -- what made them so simpatico a band then hasn't much changed.
They're still playing groovy blues-rock with an agreeable balance of swagger and humility -- if anything, that signature sound, which is a sun-baked John Lee Hooker on the HORDE tour, is only more seasoned with age. They don't sound like a 1990s relic so much as a journeyman band that never compromised itself; everyone has a Big Head Todd story -- everyone feels like they go "way back" with Todd Park Mohr and his mates -- because that kind of consistency takes time and discipline. The result is when they're back on stage, playing those sturdy songs from "Sister Sweetly" and other albums, they come easily like the return of old friends.
At the Cap they tucked in to the Monsters catalog, spreading out a 90-minute set among classics ("Bittersweet", "Circle"), more recent cuts from 2014's "Black Beehive" and new singles "Wipeout Turn" (a pulsing rocker with a typically gnarly Mohr solo) and "New World Arisin'" (a frothy roadhouse romp with scorching lap steel from Jeremy Lawton). Mohr's longtime and long-unflappable rhythm section -- bassist Rob Squires and drummer Brian Nevin -- kept the pockets thick yet springy, even when the band shifted into more tender and soulful material like "Angela Dangerlove" and "Please Don't Tell Her."
Mike Doughty, a 90s alt-rock hero who wrote incendiary, tongue-twisting songs with Soul Coughing and since then as a maverick solo artist, proved an inspired choice to pair with the headliner (along with Howard Stern staple Fred Norris, who'd played the early set as a special guest on the bill).
Dressed in blue robes and paired with longtime co-conspirator Andrew "Scrap" Livingston on cello, Doughty offered an arresting, psych-tinged set of urban folk, including "27 Jennifers," "Busting Up a Starbucks," "I Hear the Bells" and, in one of his brief nods to the Soul Coughing catalog, "Lazybones."