Kate Clover wants it now

The Los Angeles rocker and her band mine their sources with spirited songs

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Watermelon, a Chicago band that self-describes as “super sour punk,” opened last night at Cobra Lounge. I noticed right away that the drummer was sporting a Hoodoo Gurus t-shirt. A good omen, I thought.

I was right. Watermelon—the drummer and two women with matching powder blue Mosrite guitars, shag haircuts, and skinny black jeans—blasted out a dozen or so three-chord rockers, all super-charged power riffs and hollered vocals. At one point, the bass player announced the next song, and the drummer was heard to ask, “How does that one start?” The guitarist answered, “Like all of the other ones.” The appealing Watermelon in a nutshell.

They dashed through maybe a dozen songs about being anti-social, clumsy, and fast food queens craving Ritalin. If you’re hearing the Ramones in that litany, you’ve got good ears. Watermelon channels the Kings of Queens in two-minutes blasts of snotty rock and roll, their very sincerity and grinning enthusiasm forgiving all manner of revivalism. Last night, the guitarists and drummer played as if they heard the Ramones first three albums for the first time last week.

---

The stylish Kate Clover channels Bowery street rock in a different way. She hails from Los Angeles and lived in Mexico City for a while, but she hung out spritually in Detroit and Manhattan. As her bio puts it, “With Patti Smith and Iggy Pop as her artistic North Stars, Clover mastered three chords and defected to art school, where she learned to play ‘Chinese Rocks’ by Johnny Thunders, and wrote her first song.” Last night, she and her band grooved a small crowd at Cobra Lounge with a clutch of hook-filled, guitar-driven rock and roll—Clover’s songs get fully inside of the traditions she’s mining, from 60s AM radio to late-70s punk, her durable melodies and spirited choruses fresh and galvanizing.

She wore a three-quarter-length black dress with a leopard-print collar, black heels and white bobby socks, blonde bangs and blazing red lipstick—her essential super hero costume judging by most of the photos I’ve seen. Her dapper band—Giuliano Scarfo on guitar, William Evans on bass, and David Field on drums—were decked out in black suits and skinny black ties, the latter swiftly loosened in the heat. If the band looked traditional onstage, the energy coming from it made any comparisons to the past moot. Clover’s songs are tight, pop-conscious, and brimming with fizzy and sometime anxious energy, and her band delivers them with gusto. (Clover plays rhythm guitar, red to match her lips.) The guzzled PBR instead of water, and had a great time.

Clover played seven songs from her winning debut album Bleed Your Heart Out (2022) and a handful from her brand-new album The Apocalypse Dream. She was asked recently in The Big Takeover what come first for her as she writes a song. “It always begins with a riff or some chords.” she replied. “Everything gets shaped after that. Lyrics are always last.” This didn’t surprise me much, and last night’s performance cast that remark in sharp relief. Clover’s lyrics were unfortunately drowned out by the driving beat behind them, the consequence of an unhelpful mix—I had to move directly in front of the stage if I wanted to hear a balanced sound. The result was a roar of tuneful power pop, but its concerns, discoveries, and arguments left behind as the singer mouthed the words that she wrote last. Things improved when I moved to the center, but I wanted to hear more clearly what Clover was singing about, and to what her powerful melodies were in service.

Scarfo didn’t mind, anyway; he channeled Wilko Johnson and Johnny Thunders at once as his searing, biting leads cut through the club with power and precision. If he seemed throughout to be as concerned with the poses he struck as with what he played, it didn’t matter a bit—his guitar playing was so propulsive that it stayed just ahead of the player all night, as if he were both creating and then catching up with what he played. I’d love to hear his list of his favorite guitar solos.

Some of songs blurred together a bit, a result, I think, of Clover’s disinclination to vary the pace of her set. But a quartet of songs from Bleed Your Heart Out really leapt out. “Love You To Death” rode its tangle of guitars to a catchy, singalong chorus that Joey Ramone would’ve been pleased to have composed, and in “Channel Zero,” Clover sang at the top of her register about miscommunication and “signal failures” (of both the technical and emotional sort), climbing to a chorus the melody of which was so sweetly poignant that it would’ve worked in an acoustic ballad. But Clover and her rockin’ band want nothing of that, grooving with eighth notes, galvanic chords, and power strumming that created loud, sonic bliss. “Pleasure Forever” barreled forward on one chord in its verses, until exploding into a chorus where Clover yells “I want it now!” as her band played changes so simple they made the singer’s demands clear and explicit. Another phrase that rang clear and true was Clover’s raw, vulnerable cry of “Obliterate my heart” in “Daisy Cutter,” sung in a giddy, fizzy, knockabout chorus that sounded both fun and desperate.

And things really jelled when the band lit into “Like a Domino,” a song from the new album, riding a sexy, low-slung riff—nagging and relentless—that altered the mood of the evening a bit. There was something in the arrangement and pissed-off energy. It was thrilling performance. The song was written “after a night out,” Clover remarked recently to S.W. Lauden at Remember The Lightning. “I came home and wrote the chords and woke up and completed the lyrics. I heard a woman say she played him  ‘like a domino’ and thought the innuendo was incredible. That song is a good change of pace in our set. It’s easy to move to.” Clover’s strongest songs belie the surface attention to style in her and her buddies’ look: she’s singing pop songs about complex, sometimes messy stuff.

---

Appealingly, Kate Clover hustled her way to the merch table just minutes after the show was finished, accompanied by her equally sweaty bass player, both grinning widely, if with traces of exhaustion. [Note: their enthusiasm was all the more impressive after I learned from Clover, in a response to my Instagram post of this review, that she and were band were all sick and had all but lost their voices.] I picked up Bleed Your Heart Out, complimented her on the show, and said that I hoped they’d be back to Chicago soon. “We will!” she crowed, with a confidence and a certainty nice to see in this rough era for traveling musicians. The cool Cobra Lounge is a small venue, the kind of place without a “backstage.” The bands’ gear was stacked up against a wall near the back, behind a rope. “Follow my heart to the poor house,” Clover sang in the last song of the set, a common lament offered with an ironic half-grin by many a touring artist. With her clutch of powerful pop songs and a driven band behind her, I’m going to bet that she’ll be playing bigger joints soon enough.

All photographs ©Joe Bonomo