The New Bomb Turks at the Abbey Lounge, August 19, 2006
By JESS MCCONNELL | August 21, 2006
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It’s become fashionable this year for semi-obscure/legendary punk groups – Gorilla Biscuits? Lifetime? -- to get back together, sell out rooms twice as big as what they used to play back in the day, and sell enough merch to put their kids through college. By contrast, the New Bomb Turks reunion the other night at the Abbey Lounge, a thousand miles from their hometown of Cleveland, was almost ridiculously subtle. Revered among garage-punks, and taken for granted by the time they called it quits, the Turks had no good reason to play exactly two reunion shows summer (the other’s in Ohio). And instead of making a big deal out of it, they went out of there way to guard against any outlandish hype: they were in Boston ostensibly for a release party thrown by Somerville-based punks the Spitzz (drinking buddies whom the Turks have helped with production assistance). What’s more, the Turks are not planning on reuniting for more work after this. And dude, they did this at the Abbey – you couldn’t hide the year’s most important garage-punk revival better if you tried.Not like you needed to be reminded, but NBT likes it raw. As I hunkered along a side wall bathed in orange light, sweat collected on the neck of the girl in front of me, and my cohort’s glasses were knocked permanently askew by a beefy arm (not mine).
Earlier, Spitzz — half of whom were known around Boston as ’70s-inspired punk gurus Showcase Showdown — played a varied set that included “Chloroform Fun” and songs from their new LP, parts of which were produced, a couple years ago, in conjunction with the Turks. They kept up a spin of spare drums, focused strumming, and slightly conspiratorial singing; guitars clanged and rang up and down the frets as husband/wife team Tom Cloherty (guitar) and Victoria Arthur (bass) teamed up on the vocals, tempting the crowd away from the bar and the lopsided Cards/Pats game lurking on TV sets in the side room.
People got into it, out of curiousity more than anything, asked for an encore, and then ebbed back into the general direction of the bar, along with the older hardcore set of regulars from Abbey. Fast forward 40 minutes, and the collection of pierced metalheads, weathered scenesters, bald domes, and bearded hippies (in the words of Turks frontman Eric Davidson) have packed the room, thrashing around with fists in the air, throwing beer cans at the ceiling. And, considering the circumstances, it’s all relatively polite; the worst-behaved person in the room is probably Davidson.
He’s swinging from the pipes, squirming his way across the top of the Abbey Lounge and roaring like a wildcat. You have to love this man. He’s greeting the masses, taking pictures of them with their own cameras, biting their fingers and high-fiving them in a whirlwind of sweat and drum flourishes. Thirteen feet behind him, the three other members of the New Bomb Turks are rocking out. As Davidson gets back onstage, he grabs an orange filament cover off of one of the overhead lights, exposing the fans jumping two inches from his face with a rays of stark white light, and mimes wiping his ass with the little strip, smirking, nodding furiously, and throwing it back on the stage.
