Don't Be A Goober, Man!

That's what some guy told Jaded Insider last night (Dec. 16) at the Chavez reunion show in Brooklyn, after he and his lady friend wedged into the crowd inches from our face and were then asked to move. Luckily, that was the only idiot we had to put up with at Warsaw, where Chavez made a triumphant return to live duty. After a '95-'97 heyday, the group never really broke up but had disappeared by early 2000; it has played a handful of shows in New York since late 2004, including an opening set for kindred spirits Guided By Voices.

Chavez was thankfully thrust back into the indie rock spotlight this fall when Matador combined its two (great) albums and one EP into a three-disc retrospective, "Better Days Will Haunt You." Halfway through opener "Top Pocket Man," it was clear just how unique Chavez remains, and how underappreciated its music has been over the years. For one, they still don't sound like anybody else. Sure, there's a certain Slint-iness inherent in their dynamic arrangements and soft-to-loud explosions. And the presence of engineer Bob Weston at the mixing desk extended an allegiance to noisy rock forefathers like Mission Of Burma and Shellac.

But Chavez has its own thing going. For one, there's very little melody to propel the songs forward. Instead, it's the razor-sharp guitar attack of Matt Sweeney and Clay Tarver and the unrelenting thump of Harold Liu lookalike James Lo on drums and bassist Scott Marshall, who hadn't even rehearsed with the rest of the band until yesterday. As has been pointed out before, there's such a consistent thread running through their music that it's almost impossible to remember which songs are on which of the two albums.

Highlights of the set, which the band admitted was played in front of the biggest audience of its career: "You Must Be Stopped," "You Faded," "Tight Around the Jaws," "Pentagram Ring," "Break Up Your Band, "The Guard Attacks," "Unreal Is Here," "New Room" and "White Jeans." The proverbial "rock" was omnipresent, an impressive return by a band that never really seemed ambitious enough to break outside of the Big Apple. After all, they cancelled two of the four shows they planned to play this month after Sweeney broke his arm in a, um, "rough-housing accident."

It's unclear if Chavez will retreat right back into obscurity, but even if they do, they can rest assured they played one of the best shows of their career for an audience that had been waiting to see them do it for years.

As an aside, J.I. chatted with Weston after the show to find out what is taking the new Shellac album so long. The answer? The artwork is being individually silk-screened (ie, 20,000 times), so it's unclear when it will be ready. "It could be June or it could be September," Weston told us, adding that the album has been finished since this June. He did reveal the title, which is the rather awesome "Excellent Italian Greyounds."