Excerpts from Concert Review: Thee Minks at Magnetic Field, Brooklyn NY 8/3/07 Thee Minks are the kind of band that you see and you say, mmm-hmmm, good. If you’ve had a few drinks, YOU FUCKING LOVE THEM. Hope Diamond, their guitarist, turns her amp up so loud she doesn’t even use a pick.(YES, I DO!) All she has to do is brush the strings of her Gibson SG to get the most evil, distorted, overtone-laden tone I’ve heard this year. Liz Lixx, the bass player, rocks the primitive bottom, she has great bass lines and she has a cool bass, a beautiful black-and-white Gretsch. The drummer, who goes by the name of the Playthang, is excellent, and the band rewarded him by giving him an amusing vocal cameo toward the end of the show. The Philadelphia band’s best songs came toward the end of the set. They’d started out pretty much by-the-book garage/punk, nothing you haven’t heard before if that’s your music, if the 13th Floor Elevators, MC5, Kinks, Lyres or Mooney Suzuki are your thing. Their website says they bear some resemblance to Radio Birdman, but I didn’t hear that at all. About halfway through the set things suddenly got more interesting: more melodies, unexpected chord changes and a lot more imaginative stuff. The songs’ subject matter seems to be limited to drinking and sex – or both – but at least they’re about something, which is more than you can say about 99.999% of the Sonic Youth ripoffs out there. And there’s absolutely nothing trendy, pretentious or affected about this band. They just want to kick. Your. Ass. And then they do it. Their last numbers included a punked-out cover of Livin' After Midnight by Judas Priest (it seems that they actually like the song, instead of making fun of it: whatever the case, their version kicks the shit out of the original). And they did a song about their drummer where he got to sing about what kind of crazy animal he is. “I’ll eat your fucking children,†he hollered, before a series of false endings that wound up with him flailing around Spinal Tap style. The crowd loved it.