I saw this impressive duo support a band whom I cannot recall and so thought I’d see their headline show when they came to town. Good drumming.

Date: June 11, 2009

Venue: Rock City Basement

It seems like every cool band in California comes from a hardcore punk-rock lineage, instilled with a vehement intensity and DIY ideals. None display this more than Sacremento two-piece Middle Class Rut, an all-encompassing death charge of propulsive, echoing rhythms and menacing euphoric clatter.

With the influence of Jane’s Addiction evident, MC Rut fire-bomb the audience with a riff-churning, four-armed flailing assault on the solar plexus, and this Download warm-up show in the dusty Rock City basement may have been short on crowd numbers but you sense that these guys would play to an empty room just for the sheer enjoyment of it.

With a new album to push, this bass-free-yet-loud-as-bombs roundhouse kick of a performance illustrates their bipolar melodic noise spectacularly. And despite their paucity in numbers the sound they emit is ear-shatteringly brutal. Think the White Stripes wired to the National Grid, and without the feeble country and western wistfulness or whatever Jack White is into these days. Oh and without a watery drummer, too.

In fact, Sean Stockham is so wild on his kit that Zildjian cymbals must be rubbing their hands in eagerness to replenish battered metal. For the crowd, meanwhile, the only thing that’s battered is their collective eardrums.