Schlong/Triclops!/Future Imperfect; El Rio, Mar. 14th

Posted by glen609 on March 22, 2009

Triclops! I’m a fan of bands with Umlauts and/or Exclamation points and I’m a big fan of four piece rock bands that kick ass. I didn’t think I was such a big fan of extreme FX on vocals, but it works…

Triclops! has foot lights!

Like the Hemlock Tavern on Polk, only about half the miscreants at the El Rio are there for the music. The bar and the outside patio are sufficiently separated from the stage so that the beer swilling, conversation loving guitar-phobes can lubricate their own vocal cords and hear each other talking about the next big thing. In their efforts to see into the future, or wax nostalgically about the past, these people are missing out on the visceral present.

Of course you can hear Triclops! from the patio, indeed from miles away, and you can listen to their silly songs on Myspace, but you can’t truly experience them without being right up front and having them enter your earholes and eyeholes firsthand. It’s an undeniable maelstrom of jubilant intensity punctuated by flashes of blinding light emanating from the crowd surfing and vocally ambidextrous singer Johnny’s microphone and, in a new development, duct taped to the tops of his oft inverted kicks. I don’t know what he’s singing about (because I’m a guy and I generally don’t listen to vocals and anyway they’re heavily laden with pitch and formant shifting electronics for a ghastly pharmacopic effect, but with song names like “March of the half-babies” and “Iraqi Curator” I’m quite sure they’re brilliantly infantile. Johnny spends more time on the ground, spinning around on his head, or up in the air suspended on up-stretched hands than on the stage.

Christian on guitar, bassist Larry and drummer Phil take up enough stage space without him. Apparently, when local frontman extraordinaire Jello Biafra heard them for the first time he chased them down in a pink Cadillac Hearse and signed them right up on his rogue-ish Alternative Tentacles label.

These four don’t waste any time. They start right in on your lugubrious, Depression era senses and pick ‘em right up to the transcendent stratosphere where mind numbing self reflection or critique has no time to worm it’s way into your otherwise natural state of confident perfection.

As noise machines go this one is the Swiss watch of gear meshing harmony, confounding the boundaries between technical proficiency and unconscious spontaneity. Something like the mind bending efficiency of the perfect drug, but without the hangover.

Christian keeps up the overdriven riffage and the unyielding rhythm section locks into your skull with in-profligate intensity. Christian’s Orange head conked out just before the show, and there was a certain amount of foreplay like confusion, but nothing was lost with the makeshift Roland replacement. I’m sure Christian wasn’t too happy about the situation, but nobody else noticed. We were too busy getting pummeled.