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Review: Eve and the Exiles at the Continental Club
Eve and the Exiles occupy a gap between the Temptations and Sha Na Na on the stage-presence spectrum. For their CD-release show Thursday at the Continental Club, everyone in the five-piece, save for drummer Mike Buck, began the set with their backs to the crowd. One by one they turned around and eased into a blues-rock instrumental with Dick Dale accents. Guitarist Homer Henderson and maracas player Donna Pearl took turns repeating the name of the band until the song was over and Eve Monsees, her hair jet black and her guitar snow white, was primed to get it on with the new ones from “Blow Your Mind,” a smokin’ album of three-minute ditties about love lost and found.
Songs like “Key to My Door” and “Honey I Need” were derived from ’50s-style rock in the vein of Buddy Holly and the Crickets, but had traces of the blitzkrieg bop born of the Ramones, whom Monsees and fellow guitar-slinger Gary Clark Jr., her running buddy since third grade, listened to when they weren’t poring over the blues masters. Nowadays, Henderson is Monsees’ Clark. It’s an odd pairing, what with Henderson old enough to be the 25-year-old’s father, but as the Stones have shown, rock knows no age limits. Indeed, Henderson scored big complementing Monsees on guitar, and he gave a macho rendition of his lone song, “Night of the Phantom.”
The crowd, small in number and deafeningly silent, was probably nothing like the crowd at the blues festival in Finland the band just played (Monsees was skeptical of the invitation, figuring the message on her machine was for a festival in Midland, not Finland). But that changed when the band went into attack formation, wherein their synchronized walk-like-an-Egyptian maneuvers elicited hoots and hollers. Clifford Antone sure knew what was up when he invited Monsees onto the Antone’s stage for the first time when she was 15.
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