Mosh pit worthy surf-pop: Bleached live

by Josh Edgar

California surf-pop quartet Bleached stopped by the Silver Dollar Room on Thursday, April 25th, to bring some much needed sun to a particularly gloomy Toronto night. The band was wrapping up their tour in support of their new LP Ride Your Heart, out last month on Dead Oceans. Fans filtered into the compact Spadina Ave. venue that night to get a nice buzz going in anticipation of the night’s high-energy headliners.

As the club reached capacity, Brooklyn sludge-pop group Hunters took the stage and launched straight into a blistering, blow-the-house-in set of seven or eight songs from their couple EPs to date. Particularly noteworthy was vocalist Isabel Almedia’s performance as she danced throughout the set with a ferocious energy that would make Iggy Pop look like Morrisey, executing perfectly placed karate kicks that brought the waffle soles of her chuck taylors mere inches from crowd members’ faces.

Bleached have spent the extent of their tour having to follow the ballistic punk energy of Hunters, which is no easy task, but as the band started into their first song, it was clear who the audience was there to see. As front woman Jennifer Clavin shouted over the wall of noise from the drums and electric guitars, fans from blonde girls in dresses to guys with beards and baseball caps matched her every word, save for a surprise cover of the Misfits’ “Horror Business”. A few songs into their dozen-song set a mosh pit— which seems unlikely for their style of music but was fitting given their stage presence—opened up in front of the stage and kept going until the last song.

With a studio LP and a North American tour now under their belts, Bleached are poised to either break out a la Best Coast or lose momentum and fizzle into obscurity, but if their live performance is any indication, Bleached are likely to become more than a summer fling.