By Benjamin Joe
(Image above: Film & Gender)

The Lavender Room, a queer-ran promotion and production company in Buffalo, will present a night of hardcore music Sunday (May 24). Bands on the bill include local legendary femme-fronted band Hostile Makeover, as well as relative newcomer to the scene, femme-fronted Lil Twiggy and the Green Aardvark Mafia.

Film & Gender of Northampton, Mass., and Jerry Big’s World Famous Band of Rochester will be joining the stage as they tour Western  New York.

Iss Manzi, vocalist and bass player of Film & Gender, said this will be the first time he and drummer Emerson Mullane will be playing Buffalo and they are excited. (Anthony Franco plays drums for the band, but he will not be on this tour) The two-piece drums and bass punk rock act are a band to be seen live, he said, and while the band has enough material for three or four albums, the queer-dance-core touring act manages to make it by on one EP and several singles.

“I view Film & Gender as a live band more than a band you listen on Spotify to,” Manzi said. “I kind of let the music move me, when there’s good energy, and I send that energy out into the crowd and I hope the crowd sends that energy back to me. We just keep having that sort of tennis match and — I don’t know — it’s such a privilege to go on tour with music.”

For Max Wakeline, frontman and guitarist of Jerry Big’s World Famous Band, this will be his first trip to Area 54 as he and his band tour a weekend with Film & Gender.

“We just play fast and powerful music,” Wakeline said over the phone a day before the tour began. “We play really fast and like to play anthems for the youth.

JBWFB started out as a drum and bass duo, also, but Wakeline has now switched to guitar and recruited Eric Mohan for drums as Jared Effman continues to play bass and Yassir Ahmed is on second guitar.

Of course, Hostile Makeover, with members David on bass, Ben on drums, Daisy on guitar, and Mariyah on vocals, will be at the show playing politically charged hardcore punk and bringing fun, heavy and queer hardcore to the bill.

Lil Twiggy and the Green Aardvark Mafia rounds out the bill as a brother-sister duo with Emma Cox in front playing guitar, bass, synth and vocals as her brother, Aleister Cox, plays drums and a sample player.

Also politically charged, they are anti-facist, anti-capitalist, anti-authority, pragmatic anarcho pacifist band.

“Our most politically important song is a song about choosing radical unity and empathy in the face of an uncaring and collapsing world,” they said. “We advocate individual readiness, in mind, body and spirt, because the world will only get worse and we see a community  unprepared for that eventuality.”

Benjamin Joe writes about music and the arts – particularly hardcore punk – for The Buffalo Hive.