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The Fakers seem like kind of a mediocre punk band. The lead singer can actually sing reasonably well, but he mostly doesn't bother to, sort of grunting along, not very tunefully. When he makes the effort, he has some nice melodies, but everything else about them is really, really basic, and hard to get excited about.
The Lot Six have great strings. The bass is solid and powerful, and the two guitarists churn out an endlessly fascinating array of crunch and skronk. I could do without the vocalist screaming over the top, but I don't much mind him; I just don't think he adds anything. Maybe the words are really interesting. The songs have a hard, punky urgency to them, but they also have more interesting structures, with a lot of stop-start and fast-slow dynamics. The last song is especially strong in this regard, with a real feeling of grand finale.
But we've come here to see Gibby Haynes and His Problem. I came prepared for train wreck--the last couple of Butthole Surfers albums were fairly weak, and it's not like he was ever anybody's idea of stable or predictable. But it's Gibby Haynes, so we had to give it a try, since it could be life-changingly bizarre. It's not, but it's quite good. Gibby's only sort of a frontman: he sings, but he's way off to the side of the stage playing with a keyboard and an odd electronic console that, in perhaps my favorite surreal detail of the evening, has the names of several professional golfers written on top. Visually, the whole experience is dominated by the hallucinatory videos projected behind the stage. He makes a half-hearted attempt at patter at one point, then states that, "I can't communicate with you people." And so he stops trying. He's also mixed way low, but that might be intentional. Mostly, he manipulates his electronics to put weird echoey/spacey bleeps and gurgles over the band's remarkably straightforward rock/psychedelica. The band are really good, with perfectly solid drumming, wild guitars, and a killer bassist whose dominant, melodic lines are the most songlike things in these songs. We get exactly one Surfers song, which gets the most enthusiastic reception from the packed house and which plays up how much more musically accomplished most of their own stuff is. They, too, end with a long musical ramble, this one driven by the drummer, who keeps slowing down and crescendoing as if ending the song before bursting back into another crunching, speedy pattern and dragging the rest of the band along with him. They do this for several minutes, after which an encore would be entirely superfluous.
