AGH! Minibosses!
Minibosses With Penny Winblood, JETOMI, and Chief Beef
By Dean Bonzani
8.2.05
Great galloping Christ! This stuff’s making me go blind.
What? The music of Phoenix’s Minibossses? No— heavens, no.
The music of the Minibosses, consisting entirely of NES cover tunes, is awesome. Or, in less “young-ish” terms, invigorating. Precise, while retaining what Brian Eno insists is vital to ANY rock music: a hint of evil. Without going into an exploration of the origins of evil in humankind (two word spoiler— Deoxyribonucleic acid), suffice it to say that there’s swagger in the hips of the ‘bosses, and it’s for a damn good reason. They rock.
No, what’s making me go blind is the case of Sparks delicious caffeinated malt beverage that I drank to better understand the subculture of the Minibosses. Like an overenthusiastic anthropologist, I threw caution to the wind and chugged down a dangerous volume of the Minibosses’ avowed favorite beverage, and I’ll be paying for my foolishness for a good week, if my intuition serves me. Sparks tastes awful. Think of it as carbonated absinthe. If I live through the night, I’ll happily go back to mixing Penguin mints and vodka.
In a nutshell, the Minibosses are a four-piece band from the Valley of Fire who play meticulously arranged cover versions of Nintendo Entertainment System game soundtracks, loud and hard. Their name refers to the entities that impede a player’s progress in videogames, but are less powerful and vicious than the threats that await one at the end of each level that must be defeated before a player can move on— the bosses.
True gamers derive the maximum benefit from the Minibosses concept, as they’ve usually been raised from puppies playing every game that’s been made. This is not to say that non-gamers (was that a snort of derision?) won’t be making the devil horns when the first power chord rips out of the Minibosses’ warmly humming amps during soundcheck. But it helps if you know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with the melody to “Ninja Gaiden” bleeping in your skull.
Minibosses got their start in Massachusetts, where Matt Wood (drums), Aaron Burke (guitar), and Ben Baraldi (bass) met as students at University of Massachusetts. Burke and Wood met in astronomy class; Burke met Wood in abstract algebra class. When Baraldi took a job in Phoenix in 2000, the others came along, and since then, they’ve added guitarist John Lipfert to their lineup with the departure of Fred Johnson.
The Minibosses’ tightly harmonized, two-guitar attack is reminiscent of the pairing of Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter from Lou Reed’s “Rock and Roll Animal” album (buy it, turn it up loud, love it forever), Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham of Thin Lizzy, or fanatical soccer fan Dave Murray and Adrian Smith of Iron Maiden.
Or two Brian Mays.
Painstakingly recreating the melody lines from video games like “Mega Man 2” is daunting enough a task. Doubling those melody lines in harmony, in a song that plays out to over nine minutes is nothing short of heroic. Which means the Minibosses are American heroes. Very tall American heroes who don’t make any money from their recordings, and work day jobs to make ends meet.
The Minibosses enjoy a devoted following across the country, and are road veterans who’ve played from coast to coast in bars, house parties, comic book stores, hacker cons, and gaming festivals. All without the blessing of the Nintendo company, who never return the calls of the band.
The blood-related Chief Beef are comprised of Stewart Alaniz (drums), Aaron Burke (guitar/vocals), Christine Lipfert (bass/vocals), and John Lipfert (guitar/vocals), and don’t sound at all like a “vocals” version of the ‘Bosses. Far from it. Firehose comes to mind, as does Hüsker Dü, and a touch of Foo Fighters. Check out www.myspace.com/chiefbeef for some tasty, high-protein .mp3 downloads. Their track, “Treadmill At The Gym,” is faintly reminiscent of movie-star-handsome, local rock gods JETOMI, with its locked-up guitar/fuzzbass onslaught and Robert Fripp-ish odd harmonizing. Mmmmmm, fuzzbass.
Close personal friends of the Minibosses, Penny Winblood, have a brand new split CD digipak out on Forge Records, that they share tracks with the ‘Bosses on. Recorded by Bob Hoag at Flying Blanket Studios in Mesa, Arizona, it features NES favorites “Castlevania,” “Double Dragon,” and “Ninja Gaiden” from the ‘Bosses, and “Art At 20,” “Fire Is A Hungry Bitch,” “Javelina,” “ JC’s Nuts,” and the Sonic Youth-infused “Pinky Swear” from Penny Winblood, who are Nate Wicka (vocals, drums) and Rachel Cohen (vocals, guitar) of Brooklyn, New York. Their sound is frantic, heavy, and wants to throw your kitten off the fire escape. Uh, then run down three flights of stairs really, really fast to catch it.
Gadzooks, but Sparks is vile stuff.
The Minibosses, With Penny Winblood, JETOMI, and Chief Beef, 8:00 P.M.- 12:00 A.M., Saturday, Sept. 3 rd, at The Boardwalk. All ages, bar with I.D.
©2005 By Dean Bonzani. All Rights Reserved.