Tuesday never gets much limelight in the context of the work week. Monday has come and gone, but stuck on day two out of five, the weekend still looms somewhere far on the horizon. With the help of quirky pop groups Dead Gaze and Dent May at Cholmondeley's this past Tuesday, all in attendance were reminded of the virtues that come with perspective. If you change your outlook, the weekend is always waiting just around the corner.

In fact, perspective plays a big role in the sound of both bands. Pop music can be a bland and superficial genre, but Dead Gaze and Dent May have a lot of fun playing with genre and toying with convention. Both hailing from Jackson, Miss., the bands echo their hometown's motto, the "City with Soul."

Keeping the hooks, melodies and sing-along feel of pop music in place, and drenching them in reverb, delay and bass-lines taken right out of the funk handbook, Dead Gaze and Dent May craft pop music born out of their own secret recipe that yields Friday night vibes any day of the week.

Dead Gaze took the stage first and cranked their bit-crushing fuzz to 12. The band's lo-fi take on the domain of pop music transformed Chum's into a veritable speaker box of glorious noise. A few songs into their set, however, the monitors decided they were taking too much abuse and refused to keep working.

However, with songs compressed so far into the red, there's no real need for fine-tuning. The beauty of the lo-fi aesthetic is that it is all about texture. The noise accompanying and surrounding the notes occupies the space between primal artistic expression and fine-tuned studio gloss.

After some technical fiddling, Dent May and his gang hopped up on stage, tamed the fuzz boxes and the monitors decided they could probably get back to work for a little bit.

Toning down the noise aspect somewhat, Dent May crafted a type of bedroom surf-pop psychedelia that could easily soundtrack a hazy Saturday spent driving down the coast with a surfboard on the roof and eyes out toward the ocean. Touring in support of his sophomore album, Warm Blanket, May cleansed the audience's palette of his noisy predecessors and was able to elicit some laughter and adoration from the crowd with his playful banter about life in Mississippi and the band's visit to Walden Pond earlier that day. Taking notes from the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson specifically, May's music harkens to a bygone era of carefree summers and everlasting weekends, a theme doubtlessly referenced in the highlight track, "Born Too Late."

While some of the crowd shimmied about to the driving grooves, and others tripped out on the light bouncing off Chum's ubiquitous disco ball, toward the end of his set, Dent May decided to ditch the guitar and join his audience on the dance floor.
This was brief though. It seemed that he quickly became bored with the floor and opted to climb on top of the bar and strut back on forth before lying on his back to belt out the final notes of his set.

Tuesday might not be a highlight of the week normally, but in just two hours, Dead Gaze and Dent May were able to transcend the monotony and blast the occupants of Chum's to a faraway land where weeks play out from Friday to Sunday and there are unlimited surfboards for everyone.
*