Had a feeling there might be trouble with this show: Uz jsme doma headlining a bill with Providence, R.I., heavies Bellows, Normal Love and Whore Paint at the mysterious, if blandly, named Building 16 — a venue with no phone number and no web presence, which kinda made us wonder if it actually existed. Trolling the web, we managed to find an email address. Fired off an email with a couple pertinent questions, like how the hell do we get tickets? To which we got an auto-response telling us not to take it personally, it's just that they get so overwhelmed with email at the mysterious Building 16 that they could not possibly be expected to answer. Yeah, that's just great. Miroslav Wanek, frontman for Uz jsme doma, didn't have much more information when we cornered him before the band's Wesleyan University gig the night before. We did manage to find an address. On the Cuneiform Records web site, no less: 95 Empire Street. Which put it, more or less, right around AS220, where we had seen Uz jsme doma play about a decade ago. Which would have made things easy. If it were the right address. It wasn't.
Just back from the second stop on Uz jsme doma's US tour, their first since 2007, and I've gotta say, man, aren't the Wesleyan University kids just the coolest? And I'm not just saying that because I'm afraid the little bastards will give me another shiner. No, I wear those colors under my right eye as a badge of honor. It's the first time I've gotten a black eye from a college student since, well, since I was a college student all those years ago, before most of them, probably all of them, were born. And it's certainly the first time I've ever gotten a black eye in church. It's also the first time I've seen Uz jsme doma play in a church — Memorial Chapel, a 19th-century Gothic Revival brownstone, one of the most prominent buildings on the Middletown, Conn., campus: Pews, pipe organ, everything but the preacher. And, just a half-hour before show time completely empty, except for the band and two jocks from WESU-FM, which sponsored the show. You could hear your footsteps echoing through the building. Staked out my position in the front row, er, pew — comfortable, cushioned. A pretty strange experience, though. I've never been "comfortable" watching a punk show. You're not supposed to be.
