Throughout the course of history, many great artists have drawn inspiration for their work while confronting the innermost hardships of the human condition: love, death, even the meaning of life itself. For Shonen Knife however, the gift of song is reserved for the profound usefulness of one single household object: the rubber band.
Yes. Rubber bands.
As in, ‘Rubber Band! Rubber Band! Rubber, rubber, rubber band!’ And who else could utter such a phrase without falter, other than Osaka, Japan’s one and only eccentric pop-punk trio, Shonen Knife, who this past Wednesday brought their legendary brand of quirkiness to the SPACE Gallery for an unforgettable evening of power-chord anthems about cats, office supplies and other assorted tom-foolery. Rounding out the bill for the evening were Chicago’s punk-rock duo, White Mystery and local post-punk act Whip Hands, who kicked things off with an incendiary live set that continues to impress with its raw energy and dynamic guitar-driven instrumental passages. It may take months of death-metal-headphone therapy, or simply a frontal lobe lobotomy, before the words ‘Rubber Band! Rubber Band! Rubber, rubber, rubber band!’ are completely erased from my head, but in the end it was entirely worth it — wacky sing-a-longs and all.
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