You’d think it was the weekend or something.
City Arts Fest’s opening evening scattered great music all over town, but if you wanted to work up a booty-shaking sweat Thursday night, Neumos was ground zero.
The club played host to a heady night of beats and hedonism, with Seattle’s crown princes of partying, Mad Rad, serving as ringmasters. Opener Katie Kate proved to be a pleasant surprise, a dance-floor thrush with unpretentious regular-girl giggliness, charismatic onstage presence, and insidiously catchy songs backed by Mad Rad madman Terry Radjaw’s volley of electro-trash melodies.
There’s not a helluva lot to be said about Mad Rad’s live set–ninety minutes of new-wave-informed hip-hop that never let up for a minute–that hasn’t been said already, aside from the fact that seeing this band of adrenaline-and-humor-stoked lunatics tearing it up on the real-life party mountain (AKA Capitol Hill) should be on every Seattle music fan’s bucket list. Thank you, City Arts Fest: My ass needed some serious shaking.
