MUSIC: Duke's Campus Concert Extravangza

Your favorite band is playing some small dingy club, smelling of rank urine and cheap beer, left lying on the floor for weeks before it can be cleaned by the middle-aged custodian who comes in every third Tuesday between 2 and 4. You stand in the club, if you can even call it that, a small bar on 'roids, lifelessly sitting in a suburb outside a city with a rock scene all its own. The opening band emerges, like many do, looking like some high school kids that are too old to be high school kids about to start strumming guitars and banging on keyboards and screaming inaudibly into microphones about death and sorrow. Yes, you think you're in the musical equivelent of the twilight zone - your own neurotic hell driving you from sanity as you grab the next drink. But salvation emerges quickly as the band picks up speed. The keyboardist is dancing as he's banging on the boards and the singer is filled with more energy than can be expected for the scene. But as others stumble in to see the headlining act, they too get sucked in, sucked in to the sweet seduction of the go-go vibrations reverberating from the stage. The tattooed vagabond with a mic in his hand straps a sheet of corregated metal to his chest and and starts strumming himself with spoons, yes, spoons. You are drawn toward the stage, brought closer to the movements of this unknown wonder. The rest of the crowd follows, stunned by the opening band, the filler act, filling the room. You all press against the stage, yearning to grow closer to the show, drawn to the wonder and excitement: a new rock and a new roll. Virginia Coalition rocks. An awesome hybrid of DC go-go and college jam band, they have toured with such other campus rock staples as Pat McGee and OAR. "We just wanted to see the country and play our music," bassist Jarett Nicolay explained. "I think we found a pretty cool way of doing it." They are at heart a hard-working, small-town band, playing over 250 concerts annually, criss-crossing the nation playing small clubs and quads. A bunch of guys who love to love music, who breathe to breathe music, who feel the clean rhythm of the bass guitar and the rhapsody beats of a stack of shaking keyboards. The music is electric, a show that resonates in small clubs and makes stone university buildings shake. - Yoav Lurie This rockin' sound of good times and hipster beats will flow through Craven Quad tomorrow night, along with Alabaster Suitcase and if you are wise enough to go, be sure to sing along. Also, just so you know, they encourage their fans to record their shows and trade their music, so bring your equipment if ya got it.