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It's a night of serious weirdness at Great Scott, in honor of the Derby Dames, Boston's own new all-female roller derby league. For real. First up, and the main reason that I'm here, is Tristan Da Cunha. They are joined tonight by Mike Gintz (formerly of Clickers) on saxophone (!), and they start off with a Steely Dan cover (!!). It's skillfully and faithfully played, and followed up by Ernie also taking up the saxophone (!!!) for a very obscure Soft Machine cover which is pretty interesting. Other covers include The Police and Power Station. (I'm gonna run out of exclamation points soon, so let me just indicate hereby my ongoing slack-jawed amazement at the weirdness of this spectacle and have done with that.) I had heard some hints that something like this might be in the offing (no details, obviously), so I was prepared not to hear any Tristan songs at all. I am therefore thrilled when they play their as-yet-still-unnamed new song, with it's gloriously long, meandering yet melodic guitar riff. The cluster of impossibly small yet imposingly buff girls who've been dancing up a storm throughout the set take the Tristan original admirably in stride, and enjoy the Sparks cover when Steve and Ernie switch places (the tremendously appropriate "I Like Girls"), but they kind of give up during the Spineless cover. (Steve's old band, very meandering and proggy and Tristan-like stuff, and not terribly danceable if you're not, e.g., me.)
Next up is Joe Jack Talcum, formerly of The Dead Milkmen. (See? See what a weird night?) I unfortunately wind up missing most of his set, and I feel really stupid about it; he's playing solo acoustic, and he's not very loud, and I'm sitting at the bar having a nice chat with a friend, when I notice that he's playing. And it turns out he's almost done. So I get to hear just two and a half songs, which are fun in a surreal and cranky sort of way. His voice sounds like shit, which isn't probably all that surprising, but his set-closing tribute to the greatness of Sha Na Na is catchy and oddly heartwarming.
And then things get A LOT weirder. Seriously. The next act is Pleaseeasaur, for which a screen has been set up across the stage with a silver lamé curtain in the center, through which the one visible performer enters and exits for his frequent costume changes. The other performer is behind the screen, operating the ultra-low-tech (but well done and effective) slide show comprising two overhead projectors and the often hilarious things he displays on them, and occasionally displaying other props over the top of the screen. The guy out front sort of raps, shockingly badly, these incredibly dumb songs over simplistic prerecorded pablum. As music, it's appalling. Just incredibly terrible. But the moment when I start to get it is when, just as he says, "...get laid..." a lei comes flying over the screen behind him, and he catches it apparently without looking and puts it on while continuing to perform. That's just one of a hundred such joyously odd moments. It's all so thought-out, so incredibly stupid, and so fully realized. What a huge amount of effort. It's one of the worst musical performances I've ever seen, but it's a really entertaining piece of performance art.
After all that, The Mules, which are a silly, fun dance party of a band, seem almost tame. They're very good, in a Devo-meets-B-52s sort of way, and the dance floor is thunderous, but we're kind of tired and all bemused out, so we head home after a few songs.
