This Friday, Oct. 17, St. Claude underground music venue/dive bar Siberia will celebrate its four year anniversary with a show featuring local underground rockers Mountain of Wizard.
The band has been around for seven years and has something to celebrate themselves: the release of a new two-song EP.
Members include Paul Webb, owner of Webb’s Bywater Music Store, on guitar, Grant Tom also on guitar, Aaron Hill on drums, and Isidore Grizoli on bass.
Webb classifies the band’s sound as instrumental rock, or prog rock. With just a cursory glance, it’s tempting to call them metal, but Webb avoids that peg, saying that “when people hear metal, they think of face paint and attitude, and I’m just so not into that.”
This band has definitely carved out their own sound, and it’s really intriguing. There’s a neat juxtaposition between their dark, hard rock instrumentation/aesthetic (and the aggression you might expect to go along with all that) compared with the surprisingly smooth and soothing quality of the music.
Webb, who is a close friend of Siberia owner Matt Russell, played a key role in designing the line-up for Friday’s show. The opening acts will include two other New Orleans underground bands: Heavy Lids, which Webb describes as “weirdo garage rock…garage-y, but better than garage,” and Ossacrux, a hard-rocking, no-frills, fast metal band.
Between the three of them, they should tap into three distinct-but-overlapping local underground audiences. In addition, the lineup will also showcase hard rocking Pittsburgh metal band Dendritic Arbor.
According to Webb, the continued success of Siberia is indicative of the health of the city’s underground scene. Things had been looking grim after Katrina, when the Dixie Taverne was unable to get back on its feet in the wake of the flooding.
This now-defunct Mid-City venue had been generally thought of as “the place” for underground music, an intimate spot where all the big touring acts like Mastodon would play raucous shows when they came to the city.
The loss of this establishment was definitely a blow, but thankfully Siberia has been able to step in to fill the void. In the past four years, a whole scene has built up around the gritty, friendly neighborhood bar (with its ever-popular Polish food menu), as well as a handful of other hot spots in the immediate area.
New Orleans underground rockers certainly have a lot to party over, and this is sure to be an awesome evening.
Doors will open at 9 p.m. and tickets cost $7.
