CIRCLE RESEARCH 5TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY with SOMEONE AND THE SOMETHINGS , ABDOMINAL AND DJ FASE and the ODDITIES at the Reverb, September 26. Tickets: $6. Attendance: 300. Rating: NNNN Rating: NNNN
If you weren’t buck-wildin’ at the Reverb last Friday, celebrating anniversary five of Circle Research ‘s CKLN 88.1 show, you missed a 7 Eleven robbery! MC Abdominal battling a beer chugger! MuchMusic VJ Rainbow Sun Francks ripping the mike! Brrrrrrrrrrattttt! Starting to regret spending your Friday listening to wack R&B with your parents, huh? Setting it off, Someone and the Somethings broke everyone off a big, nutty piece of sketch comedy. The cast of comics may have worried about the incongruity of their non-rap stylings. Would hiphop heads feel their skits about the oblivious roommate who wants to share the shower to “save time” or the driving instructor who tells his student to pull over so he can rob a 7 Eleven? Would they? Player, not only did they have the crowd roaring, but their quasi-improvised steez set the tone for the whole eve’s fun, casual feel.
Next, MC Abdominal and DJ Fase began rock-rockin’ their Ill Culinary Behavior, Abs spitting about food, sporting a bare-chest-imprinted barbecue apron . After more funky joints, Fase cut the music so the MC could take a deep breath and run through eight bars of nonstop a cappella rhymes.
It’s an old Abs and Fase standard, so this time they twisted it up, offering a beer to anyone who thought he or she could chug it faster than he could kick a verse. A dude named Chuggo came, beer-battled and won. Abs was like, “When we did this in Ireland, no one beat me. Props to Chuggo.”
After some giveaways, the Oddities , a crew including Much’s Rainbow, kicked well-coordinated posse cuts over that ol’ space-gun funk and that ol’ beating-you-in-the-head-with-bronzed-baby-shoes funk. It dope as a bag of crack, but as we all know, even a bag of crack ain’t fun forever.
By the time the Oddities got off and Circle Research got on, the night had degenerated into more of a party than a show, Researchers kicking rhymes in the spirit of the old school, freestyling with a drunken Chuggo and giving shit away like rap Sajaks.
No disrespect to your parents or Lumidee, but you could never have had this much fun in your living room.
