City on the Make CD Release Show with Dragons Power Up! at 400 Bar on 6/7/08

By: Carl Atiya Swanson

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City on the Make - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

Look Persephone, I know you’ve been busy and all with that global warming thing, but thanks for putting in an appearance Saturday. It was really sweet, and if you could just keep bringing on crazy nights like that, that would be awesome, mmmkay? You made it almost too pretty to hang around in First Avenue for Chris Koza’s CD release. It wasn’t The Dark, Delirious Morning, it was glorious, raucous night.

And the fact that once you left First Ave, there was the Minneapolis Mosaic Festival, with all sorts of folk dancing, drum lines, step teams and the kind of bands that get trotted out for family-friendly fun—it was an accidental soundtrack moment. Summer in the city! It was worth a million bucks, which happens to be the name of the EP that City on the Make released that night. To be fair, it’s $1,000,000.

Heading over to the West Bank for that show was a joy in and of itself—windows down, stereo blasting “Chicks On Bikes,” City on the Make’s summer jam. Yeah, “Just another hot hot summer in my life!” If you could make that happen, we’d dig it. If CotM gets that clean version together, it should be blasting out of any deck tuned into The Current. They played it at The 400 Bar as a middle of the set blow-up, a get-down and shake-it-out roar. These are the kids you wanna know, hang out on their porch between runs to the lake and the corner store as the sun winds down.

Dragons Power Up! opened up the night for City- a proggy/emo-core mix that felt like scanning between 93X, KQ92 and Radio K. Call ‘em “stoner rock where it doesn’t matter if you’re stoned.” It was muggy, humid rock, caught between the grind and a nap. (Maybe it was road-tripping music for the cruise up from Hades.)

You know it’s summer when City on the Make have thrown off their winter blues and come out swinging, loose and amiable. Mike Massey grinned like a monkey, screamed like a bear and the crew brought their elevated, electrifying blues. You know how they do. The crowd obliged their own summer desires, turning the 400 into a ringing, stomping sweatbox.

When Mike was laid up this winter (weren’t we all while you were gone, P.?) the band seemed to become tighter, the music clearer, a sharper backdrop for the tall tales of uppers and downers, life in the city. Charles Bukowski wrote it: “some do it naturally/some obscenely/everywhere.” Stick around this summer Persephone, hang out and watch the sunburns and high times. And if you could hook up one of those nifty “Barack to the Future” buttons, I would totally rock one of those.

City on the Make: cityonthemake.net

City on the Make set list: 

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Location Info: 400 Bar
Artist Info: City On The Make, Dragons Power Up!

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