Dust Off Your Reverse Dotty And The Candy Cane Shivs

Portland | Hank Stram

Yeah, 3 old styles deep and ‘Reverse Dotty and the Candy Cane Shivs’ are bringing it. Or something like. Maybe not “bringing it”, but what they did bring was a ton of fun. Rotture on Saturday night was the place. Their performance was filled songs about “fucking”, not doing drugs, seeing if someone is hung like Danny Glover, you know, the important things.

Reverse Dotty and the Candy Cane Shivs are energetic danceable electro pop. Heavy on the beats which makes it easy to dance and bob around. Having only been around for about a year their songs are hilarious yet tightly arranged.

I completely missed the opening band Junkface. I did catch the last half of Seattle’s Das Llamas set which was impressive as well. They gave a lot of energy and attention to the performance. I wouldn’t mind seeing them again. Through out the night Neighborhood DJ held it down as the beat conductor.

One thing I didn’t expect was how loose and unpretentious they were. To dance and have a great time is their music’s goal. I appreciated “Reverse Dotty’s” attempts to get me a drink, but it was just too busy, even for a rock star like her.

Taken from the Reverse Dotty and the Candy Cane Shiv’s myspace:
Portland sheet rock band Reverse Dotty and the Candy Cane Shivs started out with one simple mission: to hang wooden owls in the kitchen sometime. As most people know, preparation for hanging wooden owls in the kitchen goes hand in hand with constantly listening to dance music which is what they were doing in 2005. Listening to dance music all the time is a good outlet for a band who plans to hang wooden owls in the kitchen, but then later on in 2005 for reasons still unexplained they decided to make new dance music instead of listening to dance music that was already made. For the next year after that, however, they continued to listen to dance music. Despite constantly listening to dance music, they made music that year too which has since been frequently linked to dancing by many many many extremely dedicated fans. The band consists of five people but is occasionally referred to as a sextet which they claim is because the kind of dance music they have been making so far is that kind where sexual innuendo (as well as literal non-fiction descriptions of sex acts) are ladled juicily over the quivering tremolo sound of heavy metal guitars stimulated rhythmically in rounds through a Marshall half-stack. Their hope is that this approach will encourage or otherwise facilitate sexual intercourse between two or more parties who are dancing or listening to the dance music. This intercourse typically takes place during the afternoon in the privacy of their own homes, or sometimes very early in the morning in nightclub restrooms or in the restrooms of bars that have dance music on the juke. It can also happen at other times in various other places just as long as it gets done.