If you feel a need this weekend to shake your indie ass to Tussle’s dub-funk, you’ll have to drive to Oberlin. The hip San Francisco quartet is skipping Cleveland on its current tour — which is just fine. I mean, sure, Tussle is really good at what it does (simply check out 2006’s Telescope Mind CD), but what it does has been done so often over the past five, six years — that is, fusing warm Tortoise-like post-rock, sinewy grooves à la the legendary Liquid Liquid, punk-disco throwdowns, and reverb-drenched dub production.
Of course, dance music doesn’t need to be groundbreaking for it to move bodies; it just needs a good beat, and Tussle most certainly has that. — Justin F. Farrar Tussle. Sunday, May 6, at the Dionysus Club (aka the ‘Sco), Oberlin College, 135 West Lorain Street, Oberlin, 440-775-8106.
This article appears in May 2-8, 2007.