Literature
Easy Tiger Patio, Friday, March 18You could spend a good chunk of time trying to pin down with any precision a solid comparison for Austin garage fourpiece Literature. It’s punkish, but still with enough melody that it never feels out of control. It’s Mission of Burma meets the Buzzcocks and they’ve had drunken threesomes on successive nights with hookers named the Jam and the Hi-Fives. Or maybe a more apt genesis would be to give Television’s Richard Lloyd surf lessons 15 years back. Or hell, maybe the closest comparison is Austin’s Harlem. Literature’s Friday night set at the Easy Tiger Patio had an edgy uncertainty to it – like that of its aforementioned scene peers. Musically, these songs are delivered with heaps of frenetic energy, but it’s sloppy and hard to tell if that’s a result of the punk ethos that being crappy can be a virtue or if it’s that they’re just plain sloppy. They held it together enough for 30 minutes, but there’s more than enough in Literature to suggest that taking themselves a little more seriously would take them a whole lot further.
This article appears in March 18 • 2011.