OC Weekly, April 15-21, 2005 WEED PATCH at DETROIT BAR, COSTA MESA Is Neal Weiss just one more reason to hate LA? Hell, yes. Dude takes his terrific li'l rock & roll band Weed Patch and slips it onto the bills of just about every decent (and not-so-decent) music club in Silver Lake, Hollywood, Los Feliz and Echo Park for the past two years, never once bothering to venture into our county to sanctify us with his songs of hope and heartache. (Weiss has even taken Weed Patch to San Diego—would it have killed him to pull off the 5 and play the Doll Hut or some other OC room on the drive back up?) But now he's finally broken down and landed a Detroit gig, so for once we can all be privy to the Patch without it costing us damn near three bucks per gallon to catch them on their home turf. The music is sort of a poppy alt.-country amalgam, suggesting a less inebriated Replacements or Drive-By Truckers, welded together by Weiss' voice, itself a kind of mash-up of Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy (especially on tunes such as "Dreaming My Days Away," "Crash Landing" and "Codeine," all off their splendiferous lone album, Maybe the Brakes Will Fail). The band would fit perfectly on a dream triple-bill with such local like-minded kin as Walter Clevenger or the Horsepainters. This won't happen Tuesday, but that fantasy will be sufficient for us to clearly envision a follow-up show, which can't come soon enough. Rich Kane |