Audio By Carbonatix
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Hare Krishna hardcore? Screamo? Whatever-the-fuck-Flogging-Molly-plays? There’s no denying it: Punk rock has gone through some seriously bizarre permutations.
And in keeping with the big-tent genre’s habit of making bedfellows of once-disparate subscenes (like suburban U.S. skate-punk and Jamaican ska), Little Haiti’s favorite holy house of wax and vegan cupcakes, Sweat Records, will host an epically random punk showcase, headlined by Portland’s the Taxpayers, a band that champions “goof punx, DIY music, social awareness, and,” of all things, “Jimmy Buffett.”
Taxpayers’ shows sound like a pop-punk marching band let loose in a zoo. And they look like it too. Riding the last bit of momentum from the Plan-It-X Records folk-punk era of the early to mid-’00s, the ‘Payers find precedent in big and wacky ensembles such as radical musical-theater extravaganza Soophie Nun Squad and anarcho-folk act Defiance, Ohio. Both groups used instruments that aren’t typical of punk rock — violin, trumpet, upright bass, trombone, banjo — while playing them fast and sloppy like true punx.
Similarly, the Taxpayers run on vegetable oil, toothy grins, and unwashed, dorky dancing.
