Diarrhea Planet @ Underground Arts with Hound and Music Band.
Text by Andy Polhamus. Images by Rick Kauffman.
Nashville power pop favorites Diarrhea Planet tore Philly a new one Friday night with an incendiary performance at Underground Arts.
Their first Philly show, held in the basement of a house near the El Bar in 2011, left some of the snootier punks in attendance remarking that, with their signature lineup of four guitarists, the boys from DP were oversaturated, overpowered and overindulgent — that is to say, excellent. The show last week was much the same, except that the band is finally playing venues that can handle their outlandish live show.
Long hair and technical virtuosity ruled the night, with Philly’s own Hound opening (their new LP, Out Of Space, drops Thursday). Their riff-heavy 1970s gloom was the perfect way to start the evening. The poppy-yet-shreddy Music Band, on tour from Nashville with DP, bridged the gap between the burned-out Hound and the hyperactive Diarrhea Planet.
DP stuck mostly to material from their recent full-length, 2013’s I’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. The band also played two new songs that carried on the warm, dirty sound of their last full-length and the more recent Aliens in the Outfield EP. Unfortunately, though, frontman Jordan Smith did not reveal the titles of those songs in a quick chat before he took the stage, so your guess is as good as mine as to the new songs’ names.
The night climaxed on the stoner ballad “Kids,” with the entire room head banging along to a devastatingly subtle (subtle for DP, anyway) contemplation on growing up. Seriously, it’s shocking how much emotion these dudes can fit into tracks that sound like the physical embodiment of what a 12-year-old hair metal fan thinks a good song should be. They finished with an encore of ACDC’s “Thunderstruck,” featuring Music Band’s Harry Kagan on lead vocals. It was an appropriately over the top ending for an already over the top show.
The next day, the guys cleared their schedule for a trip to the Mutter Museum, the macabre collection of medical oddities in Center City. Although the tour ended the next night in Washington, D.C, the band didn’t say much about what was next. But guitarist Emmett Miller is currently reading “Infinite Jest,” and he’s only about 400 pages in, so consider him occupied until at least Christmas.
JUMP: The Philly Music Project 
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