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In honor of Wack Ass Egyptians' CD release party, the Middle East seems to have booked Weird White Guy Rap Night. Pako are playing when we come in. They all have odd masks on. In addition to the drummer, they have a rapper who plays a small extra drumkit. (I like more drums.) Also bass, keyboard, and seven-string guitar. And all this in service of music that sounds like the soundtrack to a Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon, deliriously overplayed. (One audience member screams out "EVIL CIRCUS MUSIC!" between songs, which the guitarist seems to like.) The keyboard player is front and center, and he's quite the showman, hurling abuse at the audience and at one point pulling the keyboard off its stand to hump the keys.
Next up is Museum of Science, and more Weird White Guy Rap. They unfortunately play with a lot of prerecorded tracks, and that always bothers me, plus I can't really make out much of what he's saying. (This is a common problem that prevents me from seeing a lot of live rap in clubs; it's just too hard to make out the lyrics, and without them there's not always much point.) So my favorite part of their set is their jam, when they turn off the prerecorded stuff and get some friends (from the band Camarijuana) to sit in on drums and bass. The MoS drummer gets up from behind his kit and plays a squealing, knob-twisting solo on metal detector. Now that's cool.
Wack Ass Egyptians are a drinking band. So for their CD release party, they've rented a school bus and brought several dozen of their nearest and dearest to the Middle East, and nobody has to worry about driving home. It is, in short, a zoo. Rolled up socks and cheap beer fly everywhere. WAE songs are insane, goofy things, with all kinds of howlingly silly rhymes about camels and pyramids and, yes, Bea Arthur's vagina. But their secret weapon is that they balance that foolishness with a seriously kick-ass rock band. They sound great tonight, and since the crowd is primarily their people, there is a powerful energy between the stage and the audience. It gets a bit too powerful near the end; the flying beer actually takes out one guitarist's amp halfway through their last song. This is a shame, but if it had to happen, it was a good time for it, and he ends the set screaming the chorus into a mic. And the crowd, unsurprisingly, goes wild.
There's one more band playing there, but we bolt for O'Brien's, where we manage to catch about half of Blacktail's set. I've been waiting a long time for another Blacktail set, and after all that silliness, it's good to get my head brutalized a bit by a band with a darker sound and outlook. Blacktail play a very fast, insanely heavy, and wickedly complicated sort of progcore. Vocals are mostly shrieked. Guitars are crunchy and filthy and deeply layered, and the rhythms are intense and occasionally bizarre. The drummer can apparently do anything. During their last song, the bassist (and main vocalist) hands off the bass to Zack from Black Helicopter in mid-song, to his apparent surprise, so that he can collapse on the floor with the microphone and concentrate on screaming as if he were about to lose a lung. (Zack takes his sudden membership in the band completely in stride.)
