By Laura Mason
Members of lo-fi favorites Bridez hang out in this "candid" pic.
We may pride ourselves on this city’s intellectual panache or European debonaire, but the real ego tripping starts with the thriving rock & roll pedigree ingrained in the underbelly of San Francisco that I suspect is the real reason the city’s 20-something set gets dressed in the morning.
This snarling, sweating rock & roll animal is the perfect companion to the stiff drinks and barroom sleaze that dominate our night lives, and bottle-feeding this beast is Bridez. Their lo-fi gospel is true blue, rough-hewn and rife with cool angst, fronted by a singer who could be the testtube lovechild of Karen O., Lou Reed and Courtney Love. Chanteuse Liza Thorn, formerly of So So Many White White Tigers, has impressively mastered a white-hot on-stage swagger most girls only have the courage to do in front of a bedroom mirror, and is quickly blooming into the blazing frontwoman San Francisco needs.
Tight-knit walls of impenetrable fuzz and grimy, stoned jams drove their set Tuesday night at the Knockout. On the frontline of their arsenal was their newest single “Rolling Stoned”, an agile number in which Thorn traded in her usual talk-rock howls for a luscious garage purr that splendidly devolved into a ripping, venomous siren wail as the song unfolded. Guitarist Will Ivy lay it on thick, even with his bum leg, with a seamless, swampy riff for “Heart”, a laid-back ballad that exuded sexy ennui. When Thorn, her face obscured by bleached locks, vulnerably sang “One man/one man/one man” over Ivy’s thunderous reverb during the bridge, the Joplin in her really gleamed.
After enlisting a member of the audience to get her a drink like any resourceful rock star would, she whet her pipes to sing “Frenemies” , an organ-and-drum-laced mid-tempo lament about lost accomplices. Thorn bent every note like an expert talk-rocker while she strutted lithely around the stage, sometimes blending into the crowd like an amoeba. The song plateaued with feather-light trills from the organ and guitar as Thorn crooned the words “Alone, again, alone” in that revelatory haze Bridez captures so well.
This amp-sizzling combo is loudly leading the San Francisco noise brigade, and rightly so: they are true purveyors of the vein of searing, unadulterated rock & roll that first lifted this city up on its wings.
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