Show alert! Roulettes (“Wife is Talking”), Choked Up (“Tragic Bullshit”), Drummers Can Achieve (we’re skeptical!) and Del Caesar 10-year reunion (new EP: Del Casear / 3) tonight at Main Drag

If you leave now, you’ll just make it! Words by Jason Lee…

One thing we dig (amongst others!) ‘bout the Roulette’s latest single “Wife is Talking” (released in November) is it’s utter opacity—a song which mostly consists of two repeated lines: “wife is talking” and “that’s my wife!”, sounding alternately taken aback and impressed at the latter prospect; with a few additional lyrics interspersed between the repeated phrases such as “what’s that sound?” and “what’s she saying” and “blah blah blah how’s yr day” with no additional context or perspective provided—to the point where its narrator could be anyone from bus driver Ralph Kramden complaining about his wife’s constant yap-yap-yapping in an episode of The Honeymooners (timely reference point! catch new episodes on Apple TV!) …

…to someone like feminist Gloria Steinem (91 years young! yet another timely reference!) unpacking the overall dismissal and devaluation of wives/women more generally in today’s increasingly Handmaid’s Tale-like present where a recent survey revealed that 31% of Gen Z men believe a wife should always obey her husband unconditionally whilst 33% believe a husband should always have the final say on important decisions applicable to both (twice the level of Boomers who responded ‘yes’ to both questions! yea progress!) and keep her trap shut whilst he’s doing so tho’ the latter interpretation is more likely given what we know of the Roulettes and their leader Rebecca Roulette…

Thanks for reading The Deli Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

…but either way the song manages to fairly effectively capture how casual misogyny, if not not-so-casual misogyny, often underlies seeming domestic tranquility (more like domestic turmoil ammirite?!) but hey it’s like they say, the one word crucial to any successful marriage is ‘amnesia,’ or a bit more hopefully, “the secret to a long and happy marriage is not about tearing each other down, but tearing other people down together” which when it comes to placid-on-the-surface-but-roiling-underneath the message comes across just as loud and clearly in musical/emotional terms with “Wife its Talking” built on a foundation of ESG-like hyper-minimalist groove & vocals reminiscent of jump-rope chanting (“wife is talking / blah blah blah”)…

…alternating with more volcanically explosive outbursts á la Seven Year Bitch or Sleater-Kinney (“THAAAAT’S MY…WIFE!”) like the kind you might expect from yr wife if you have one (given how emotional ladies are prone to be sometimes, ammirite?!) and if you enjoy extremes such as these you may wanna consider heading to Main Drag tonight (where you may even decide to pick up a vintage guitar or synthesizer! bring wads of cash!) upstairs whilst in their dungeon-like basement performance space The Roulettes will be playing (8pm sharp! just a few hours from now!) alongside Drummers Can Achieve, Choked Up, and the reunion of Del Caesar after dropping their first EP in ten years yesterday…

…and just a quick word or two about the other acts: we’ve known Drummers Can Achieve a.k.a. “Benji” for years now as in back when he was but a functional non-achieving drummer who played the actual, um, drums (fyi: B. plays guitar and sings in D.C.A.) in more bands than we can even begin to remember (Bud Light Lime flowed thru our veins like platelets back in those days or “daze” har har) cuz if you went to Trash Bar on a random Wednesday night back in the day there’d be about a 33% chance he’d be beatin’ the skins for one struggling-yet-triumphant rock combo or another, with one of those bands possibly being the aforementioned Del Caesar (!) whose new album successfully makes the transition from the kinda twangy, kinda jangly sound they cultivated at the height of the much more complacent late-Obama-administration years…

…to a sound that’s a little more earthy, a little more rootsy and dare-we-say angry—fittingly so for our current times—on numbers like “Can We Get Angry Now?” which hey at least they’re polite enough to ask, and then finally the always compelling Choked Up who we’ve caught live a couple times before and while there’s no telling what may transpire onstage as the “melodic punk telenovela band” unleash crowd faves like “Tragic Bullshit” and “Nuts 4 Nuts” you can rest assured of two things and that’s that frontperson Cristy C. Road will wear a jaunty beret that just screams revolution now! and will be overall pissed about stuff (rightfully so!) as the band encourages you to “reclaim your brain and crush it in the current dystopia” again entirely appropriately and if yr down with the cause then you know where to be this evening…