CHERRY GLAZERR BAKED A SOLD-OUT CROWD AT MERCURY LOUNGE

Cherry Glazerr is the LA power trio that rocks like molten metal yet swoons like the sweetest pop, and they played a surprise smaller and packed early show on Monday evening at the intimate Mercury Lounge just a few days before playing a sold out show just down the street at the much larger venue Bowery Ballroom. Later in the show guitarist and vocalist Clementine Creevy embraced the crowd and gushed through the hot and sweaty ambiance, “I’m sooo glad I get to start this tour right here with all of you. You guys ROCK!” It is somehow very appropriate seeing this band play at a tiny venue much like the one I first saw them rock out just a couple years back, and just as they really seem to be blowing up and preparing to play to much, much larger sold out shows all across the country. They are going out on the road in support of their brand new album Stuffed & Ready, and they really feel they are on the edge of really breaking through to an even larger adoring audience than they already enjoy.

Opening the show was author, healer, and psychedelic rapper Melisa Rincón, better known as Bunny Michael, who sings of intense subject matter like self-healing, multiplicities within the self, and female empowerment, but she isn’t above letting it go and having a good time with some good-natured twerking and dancing about with total abandonment. She is known as a meme-maker and influencer on Instagram and Twitter, built largely on posts of duplicity and self-therapy, but her performances have all the feels of a teary and heartfelt therapy session. It’s easy to see why she has built up a lofty following of her own.

Bunny Michael

The stage set was packed with giant inflatable cherries, artsy glowing objects, and a projected light show that clearly built to fill the larger stages of which they are about to play, but felt all to comfy on one of the best smaller stages in town. The show was the venue’s early set of the night, and for 16+ ages, both of which further attracted more than your usual amounts of enthusiastic younger women who gushed at the arrival of their role model/kick-ass heroine Clementine Creevy along with her most current band lineup of bassist Devin O’Brien and drummer Tabor Allen. The band’s sound really encapsulates all the best feels, from dreamy shoegaze, to catchy up-beat pop, fierce howling metal, and low-fi garage rock, and she sails over every genre as though it is all one flowing epiphany. Despite her young age, she shreds and wails on guitar as she howls and swoons at the mic like a seasoned pro, but that should not be surprising as she has been astounding the music world since her high school days. Their set plowed through much of the new album like the new single “Daddi,” as well as delving into at least a few tracks from 2017’s awesome-tastic Apocalipstick like “Trash People” “Nurse Ratched,” and the epic closer of “Told You I’d Be with the Guys,” while I only recognized “White’s Not My Color” from her 2014 debut Haxel Princess, but they really threw me for a loop by starting their encore off with a surprise cover of LCD Soundsystem’s “Time to Get Away” from their classic 2007 album Sound of Silver. It was an impressive start to what is undoubtedly an impressive new and much larger chapter in the artic career of Cherry Glazerr, and I can’t wait to see and hear more.