TUESDAY: Cousin Brian @ Hong Kong Garden (With Slutever, White Girls & Jackie Paper).

Text by Bree Wood. Image by Cheryl Doughty.

“I think we are like a little kids learning to use a machine gun in a playground,” says singer Sean Caruthers of Cousin Brian. ”That’s what our shows are like.”

Bass player Shane Olsen, drummer Ben Harper and guitarist Elliot Bech all agree – their shows can be painful but fun. Sometimes it gets “too live” and things get broken.

Anyone who has tried to describe their sound has gotten it wrong, they say. When I asked them, they really had no idea how to label their music. What they definitely are NOT is surf punk. These are not beach lovin’ guys and they aren’t trying to out wave Wavves.

“The best description anyone has given us was the guy from Royal Headache,” says Harper, the drummer. “He said, ‘It’s all the punk you listened to when you were a teen but filtered through the drugs and depression of your twenties.’ It really is the best way to describe us. I love it. We have really happy music, but behind it we realize life just sucks.”

I had heard their EP and was interested in what they had in store for their debut full-length album, appropriately named First. It dropped last week on Mallrat Records, the new label created by Nicole Snyder from Slutever.

“We recorded more high tech than the EP,” says Caruthers. “More mics and better equipment, and I mixed it. We only did drums in a studio.”

Their record release show is tomorrow, June 19^th, at Hong Kong Garden with White Girls, Slutever, Mainline Cocksuckers and Jackie Paper.

“Come because it will be fun,” Harper says. “You will get drunk and forget things.”