.Live Review: Heatwarmer at Matrix

“When they first started playing, I couldn’t tell if it was the wackest shit ever or the most punk rock thing I’d ever seen.”
I gotta ride with my friend Josh on this one, who did eventually determine the latter. From Seattle, Heatwarmer set up in the cavernous room of Matrix in Petaluma and, before they’d played a note of their “songs,” noodled for 10 minutes or so in the most fantastically addictive way. “I hope this is their set,” I told Shane, hopelessly. “It sounds like the Wired Guitar God Parodies,” he replied, acutely.
Though the noodling was not their set, it was close. Galaxie 500 meets Mr. Bungle meets Raymond Scott meets Phish meets Quasi meets a slowly accumulating cadre of won-over appreciation on the faces of everyone at Matrix. At one point I zoned out on the keyboard player, who wore some kind of medallion around his neck, pondering how he’d memorized all the augmented chords and dexterous runs, when I realized that the electric clarinetist was unreeling the same in unison.
Grappling with an initial sense of confusion, springboarding either into “good” or “bad,” makes the final result that much more concrete. It’s why I don’t recreationally listen to much pop radio, and why Heatwarmer was, in a mentally interactive way, so positively and weirdly thrilling. Check them out here.