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Presley start an evening of miscellaneously sludgy music (and I say that with love) with a full-length set comprising an indeterminate number of songs fused into one long, spacey jam. It's a highly textured, dirty psychedelia with a lot of ebb and flow. They speed up and slow down (in perfect lockstop), various themes seem to bubble up and sink back down into the murk, and the bass offers enough of a sense of propulsion that it never feels like aimless noodling. There are occasional bursts of vocals, but they almost seem beside the point.
Devil Music are missing one of their three regular members, apparently, so they have a nine-year-old guitarist filling in for them tonight. It's entertaining (as was the sight of his little sister dancing to Presley), and it certainly immunizes them from criticism. What, I'm supposed to pick on a fourth-grader?
Black Helicopter are the Sludge Kings. Their music has a darkness both sonic and existential. Lots of cathartically grim minor key stuff, tempi that range from "moderate" all the way down to the slow end of "lumbering," and infinitely heavy bass lines. (Since the lyrics all come from recordings of some drunk and/or crazy person who used to hang out at the workplace of one or more bandmembers, they really play into the downbeat vibe.) It's some kind of testament to the amazing skills of those involved that they take all this turgidity and turbidity and make it gorgeous. The guitars are just amazing, the vocals have a slow passion, and the rhythm section feels inevitable, as if driven by laws of physics rather than by fallible humans.
Crank Sturgeon is last. He prefaces his set by wandering around the bar area (in a large, angular mask-like thing that covers his head and shoulders) urging people to come to the stage area for his performance. A few of us take him up on it. His performance involves a lot of harsh noise electronics, some prerecorded thumping synth tracks played from a small cassette player, and a whole lot of theatrics. He starts his show with a series of tea lights burning on the table in front of him, and after he sets the prerecorded synths a-thumping, he puts out the candles by expertly smacking them with a hammer, molten wax flying everywhere. He takes off the mask thing to put on more functional headgear, with a tuna can dangling from a stiff wire which seems to be a signal source for his noise setup, and which he briefly bows before playing it by bobbing his head and letting it spin around him. He's a bit thrown off when his cassette player comes unplugged, but I personally enjoy the noise a lot more without the recorded stuff. There's no codpiece this time, but there is a boa of sorts, a giant latex hose that he mics, flings around, and uses as a sort of launcher to spray oats into the audience. Possibly the weirdest thing about Crank Sturgeon—and that's saying a lot— it that he seems really surprised and put out that there aren't more people paying attention to his show; I can't imagine that he thinks this is music with broad-based appeal. (But then, he also seems impressed to count ten of us left at the end of his set.)
