Donut Age: America's Donut Magazine

Of beer and bastards

It wasn't looking good for my chances of getting to the Heartless Bastards show in Lexington last night, but thanks to a last-minute babysitting offer from a friend, Sylvia and I were able to make a date of it. Heading out from Morehead after dinner, we skipped the opening act in favor of making a stop at the obscenely huge Liquor Barn at Hamburg Plaza to indulge in a little frivolous consumerism. Besides such difficult-to-obtain-in-Morehead items as decent bread, cheese, and wine, I picked up a couple of promising seasonal beers—Great Lakes' "Nosferatu" red ale (which I am sampling right now: it's pretty damn good) and Abita's "Pecan Harvest" (I'd had a tiny sample earlier this week and was intrigued)—as well as a couple old standybys: DAB and Staropramen.

Thence to downtown Lexington, where we were somewhat surprised to find an actual nightlife in full swing. I recall going into Lexington when we first moved here nine years ago and finding the Main Street area to be depressingly deserted. Well, it seems quite a bit has changed, as there were people all over the place, spilling out of bars and restaurants (granted, the Festival Latino de Lexington a couple blocks away may have boosted the numbers, but these were still people patronizing the bars and restaurants, rather than the festival).

We made it to The Dame just in time for the start of the Heartless Bastards' set. It was, in both quality and content very much like the show they did here last fall, which is to say it was very good, but I don't have much of anything new to say about it. There was a good-sized and appreciative crowd present, and the band seemed to feed off the reception. For a few songs, they brought up the guitarist from the opening act (Pearlene), and I was digging added depth of the four-piece sound, although I should also say that the final couple songs of the main set as well as the encore, all delivered in their usual three-piece lineup, rocked just as hard, if not harder.

After the show, I tried to ask bassist Mike Lamping whether they had anything new coming out, but the Dame's conversion to late-night disco mode more or less drowned out his response. I thought he maybe looked a little apologetic, suggesting (along with the fact that they didn't play any new material) that no, there's no album waiting in the wings, but hopefully I was misinterpreting, 'cause I'll take all the Heartless Bastards I can get.