http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/music-events/dna-test-fest,1152781.htmlEditorial Review
There's basically an entire year's worth of noisy, weird, and really underground music this weekend at the Velvet Lounge for the second DNA Test Fest. It's hard to find one defining sound for the festival, but that's sort of the point. Sure, most of the bands are loud, a few of them ungodly so, but their unifying theme is simply "good, weird stuff." Friday's seven-band lineup is headlined by a pair of local bands making both figurative and literal noise. Screen Vinyl Image released the excellent "Interceptors" earlier this year, an updated take on shoegaze with plenty of screaming guitars and foreboding keyboards and vocals. The addition of a drummer has taken the live performances to the next level. It's taken less than a year for True Womanhood to rise to the top of the town's indie-rock circuit, opening for Times New Viking, Health, Crystal Antlers and more. The rest of Friday's lineup includes the 1930s-style torch songs of Armida and Her Imaginary Band, old-fashioned power pop of the Lampshades and sludge-noise freakouts of Pygmy Shrews.
The main draw on Saturday is on-the-cusp singer-songwriter Kurt Vile who is about to become your favorite bloggers' No. 1 crush. Unless your favorite blogger is David, in which case he already is. His spacey, fingerpicked, acoustic songs are hypnotic. And it will be the lone break your ears get because the rest of Saturday's bands are skull-crushingly loud. Drunkdriver sounds like you'd expect a band with that name to sound; Baltimore's the New Flesh plays hardcore heavy on the distortion and fuzz and Twin Stumps is so brutal it can only occasionally be described as actual music. You will certainly hear something new over the course of the weekend, that's for sure.
