Morning Benders Swap Cool Songs for Hot Kicks at SF Puma Store
Does it make you gay if your band covers the Ronettes during a free acoustic set at a shoe store in San Francisco on the eve of Pride Weekend? No? What if you’re wearing a pink button-down shirt? With matching pink Ray-Bans? Attire and circumstances aside, your West Coast Correspondent is starting to develop a slight musical chubby for dreamy Chris Chu and his Morning Benders.
The Morning Benders played a forty-minute acoustic set, imploring the crowd to have a seat, and taking requests from their debut album, Talking Through Tin Cans, in the absence of a set list. Chu put a charming spin on his compositions, humming his guitar solos warmly, rather than attempting to replicate their electric bite. His cohort provided excellent vocal harmonies that filled out the songs, giving the Benders enough presence to convert the shoe-adorned space provided on the upper deck of the Puma Store into something resembling a venue. Fashionable employees nodded in cross-armed approval, possibly at the band’s matching sneakers–slick in-house models which looked eerily like black Chuck Taylors.
“Puma sent me like ten pairs of shoes,” Chu told your West Coast Correspondent. “I wasn’t expecting to get them all.” Regrettably, your West Coast Correspondent wasn’t clever enough (or bold enough) to ask if any of the pairs were pink.
While “pink” is a look that Chu wears proudly, “haggard” isn’t. The Oakland-based Californian quartet just came off a national tour with MTV darlings the Kooks (darlings by way of Virgin Records, and not-obnoxious pop-rock chops), and, as of Monday, they’ve set out to play a few dates with We Are Scientists (another Virgin band). For a small band flirting with the majors, the ‘Benders are trouping along, looking and sounding absolutely fabulous.
Watch Chris Chu work another a shoe store gig in this video for “Boarded Doors.” Touche, Al Bundy.
(All photos by Desmond Miller)
Tags: The Morning Benders