I MISS MY FUN I MISS MY FRIENDS

If your fingers fall on the wrong place on the keyboard after a long day at work and you accidentally type "poppryd" instead of "poppets", Google gives you only four results. It also asks, "Did you mean: poppyd". Which actually gets you 33,900 results, mostly thanks to a self-proclaimed "Dustin Hoffman lover" named Poppy D. But now if you search for "poppyrd" or "poppyd", you'll see this post, too. I can already feel the sense of satisfaction I will experience when I check the insane traffic numbers, the next time I remember how to check that sort of thing, which I haven't done yet so I'm assuming I have more than a billion happy customers served like the butter Michael Jackson.

Poppets are a two-piece band from Gothenburg, Sweden, which seems to be where all the bands I write about come from anymore, so I figured I should check 'em out when they came through Vaudeville Mews last night. With only a handful of 7" and cassette releases to their name on labels like Sacramento's Plastic Idol and Austria's Bachelor, they do noisy lo-fi melodic pop-punk about Jack the Ripper-philes and people who're crampin' their style, oh yeah, like it's 1977 and they're hoping to get a post on punk rarities blogs (see: Killed By Death) about ohhhh 32 years from now. Didn't really sound much different live than on MySpace except for standard stuff like not being able to hear the lyrics as well, guitar problem (quickly and gracefully handled by borrowing a guitar from the opener, to whom I'd already like to apologize for some bad-look joke tweets), etc. Just a couple of slender Swedes, Magnus and Lina, staring straight ahead and shouting back and forth and bashing out three chords and reclaiming someone else's nostalgia in a way that's still weirdly fascinating to me-- what prompts young people to go out and start a punk band now that it's tradition, you know? Would've been more fun if there were 12 rows bopping along heedlessly in front instead of maybe two, but it was a Tuesday. I'd see 'em again just to find out if they broaden their steez into a Love Is All kind of thing or stick to their guns ('slong as it isn't Phil Spector's gun) like the Ramones.