I feel bad that I missed opener Hume. I have been wanting to see them and my friends told me they were good. I am screwing things up at the Black Cat lately, the shows are going on earlier than I expect. Maybe it’s just the backstage that starts fairly early? I swear I will try to see Hume soon. Because I think they are part of something good.

S PRCSS is sort of a band from nowhere at this point, DC/New York/elsewhere? So it is a stretch to call them a DC band. But I think they — along with Hume — are part of a pretty exciting time in local music. It seems to me that sometime in the early oughts the local music scene got super boring. Partly this has to do with me getting older and out of touch, and also I left the city for a while there and didn’t know what was happening. But. In the late-’90s to turn-of-the-millennium, here were some of the local bands playing around town: Fugazi, The Dismemberment Plan, Ted Leo, Burning Airlines, Flin Flon, The Make Up, Faraquet, Dead Meadow, Quix*o*tic, Crom-Tech/Orthrelm, Frodus. There were even lesser bands like Canyon, Pines of Nowhere, Bluetip, El Guapo, Q and Not U, the Rondelles. It was pretty astonishing. DC has a reputation for its music scene of the ’80s and early ’90s but I think the late ’90s were also fantastic.

By, say, 2005, though, what did we have? Medications. Edie Sedgwick. A few other leftovers from the ’90s. Mary Timony and Bob Mould moved to town. But the young crop of indie bands just never impressed me at all. Lots of boring post-Pitchfork, post-Postal Service, earnest indie bands. It felt like indie music appropriate for LNS-style socialites, not a real scene. Of course this is my own fault as much as anyone’s — nobody was holding me back from doing more with my own modest musical talent.

Luckily, though, it feels like things are picking up, and that other people are not being as lazy as me. There are bands like Hume and Imperial China and BLDNGS and semi-local bands like S PRCSS going strong. There is a thriving experimental scene that is spilling over into interesting rock music. I’ve really been digging the folks at Sockets Records and highly recommend their stuff. There is still a bit of a Dischord-related scene (I still want to hear the new Aquarium songs). Frodus is back together. It’s exciting!

I don’t want to go back to the past, I just want a reason to support local musicians again. These are the folks doing it…

I knew nothing about this band until I saw them, sometime last year, at the Lighthouse (itself a fairly off-the-beaten-path venue). Since then I have managed to piece together bits of information about the group. Seems they were a Philly-based band some time ago, but either broke up or became basically inactive, but have gotten back together at times in the more recent past via collaboration with DC’s Justin Moyer and possibly others. I found copies of a couple of their releases via eMusic and liked them, and was happy to see they were playing last weekend at Comet Ping Pong, opening up for Enon.

(Here’s the gig poster, swiped from here: )

Based on the Comet show Saturday night, it seems like Moyer is more integrated as part of the band, including lead vocals on one song and a pretty definite musical influence on other new songs. “S PRCSS 2K9″ sounded a little choppier, more DC, more Dischord, and some of it reminded me more of other J. Moyer projects like Antelope… sort of a post-Lungfish sound which fit pretty well with the weird lyrics that S PRCSS already had.

Further cementing S PRCSS as the new Lungfish was the newspaper handed out after the set by the main singer/guitarist — what’s his name, anyway? — full of metaphysical/anarchist/mystical musings. Great stuff. I look forward to hearing new material by this line-up of S PRCSS in the future and catching them live anytime the opportunity arises. You have to keep on your toes to even know about these performances — they aren’t exactly popping up in emails from ticketmaster.

After S PRCSS I and my friends stuck around for about half of Enon’s set. It wasn’t bad but they are not really my thing; I’d seen them once before and been relatively unimpressed. But it was interesting that I saw them exactly a week after seeing the Van Pelt reunion; Toko Yasuda was not part of that reunion, and had lost her voice for the Enon show. Enon have some good songs and the guitarist has some great effects (when he plays guitar) that remind me of Seth from Les Savy Fav, who are apparently pals with Enon. (And S PRCSS are label-mates of LSF… it is all ridiculously incestuous.)

Anyhow I don’t think Enon are as good as Les Savy Fav, and I think they are way over-reliant on synths and keyboards. But when they play stuff that is less dance-y and more rockin’, I find them to be a pretty decent band, just not a very essential one.

I would have stayed for the whole Enon show but I was exhausted. And there was a late-night follow-up show downtown with Edie Sedgwick and others that I just didn’t have the energy to attend. No real loss, I think… S PRCSS was pretty much good enough for the whole weekend.