Gutter Girl

Hot Flash Heat Wave

By Natalie Silver

There’s a certain brand of garagey indie sound that is easier to explain through its accompanying visual aesthetics than the makeup of the noise itself. 

You’ll know what I mean when I take you there…

You walk into the venue that isn’t really a venue, which makes it way cooler. It’s a house or a backyard or a basement or a garage, but it has a name and a Facebook page to legitimize it. The Facebook page doesn’t say it’s a venue, you’re just supposed to know. “Ask a punk for the address.” So sick. 

Your friends are smoking American Spirits and flash mops of armpit hair as they salute your entrance. They’re wearing neon overcoats over tittie petals and high waisted trousers, and they’re drinking PBR tall boys. Not because they’re cheap, but because they’re ironic. 

You walk past the makeshift merch table where there’s a jar of cash raising money to defend DACA, and enter the half mosh pit, half psychedelic dance circle that white 20-somethings in the East Bay have mastered like no other. 

And then there’s the band—which, at this point, I hope you can already hear. There’s an unmistakable sound that always accompanies this scene. It’s usually never harder than The Frights or softer than Mild High Club. Sometimes, it’s a methy appropriation of the entire Frankie Cosmos vibe. Whatever it is, whoever they are, they’re fun, young, tangible—seemingly on the periphery of your social life—and almost always mediocre. But no one cares, because you’re not really there for the music; you’re there for the party. 

So, imagine my surprise when I was at one of these gatherings in the basement of my own home. I was leaning on the back wall by the beverage station, wondering how many people had The Strokes on their sex playlists (the answer I came to was ~all of them~) and truly expecting the same old sloppy twangs from the stage across the room.  

Hot Flash Heat Wave opened with their best—a summery, yet grimy, love song, laced with angst and smug self-deprecation. “Gutter Girl,” I immediately realized, had the same conventions of that garagey indie scene I was all-too familiar with, but it stood out as radically distinctive. It was special; it was the best of the best. 

Their sound is rustic and raw and ultimately enhanced by its obviously low production value, which pairs perfectly with the torn Levi’s and film cameras populating its audience. But at the same time, the song—to put it bluntly—actually rocks…and not in an ironic way. 

The band somehow manages to convey angst and sadness under sunshiney notes and major scales, channeling a certain nostalgia only paralleled in campfire gatherings and college jam sessions. 

They tremendously encapsulate the perfect boyish melancholy—a tenderness that unfailingly is swallowed down with teenage agony and lust…and the taste of warm PBR. 

January 16, 2019