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Wednesday 3/15: The Six Parts Seven, Celebration at Red Star

Things got off to a nice majestic whoosh when The Six Parts Seven, longstanding post-rock instrumental group from Kent, Ohio, washed in to generate their magnetic fields of slow-burn interlocking guitar and somnambulant slide. These guys have been at it so long that I think they may even predate post-rock, making them pre-post-rock-revisionists, but those are just words, and the Six Parts Seven has little use for words. I believe they did address the crowd a couple times, but mostly, they stuck to the task of creating tidal waves of beautiful sound.

Celebration, the ecstatic Baltimore organ-fed trio that had captured my imagination on their self-titled record, unfortunately did not bring their A-game to my ears. Sure they got jumpy and tantric and what not, and yes, the giant lizard print Hammond B-3 that made its player look like an Oompa Loompa at the controls was daunting. But I never felt anything but increasingly irritated by their caterwaul. Not that I am in any way against caterwauling -- I am pro-frenzy and I vote -- but Celebration just didn’t deliver.

Wednesday 3/15 – Man Man at Spanish Moon

Celebration led me to abandon ship and skip on the Rogers Sisters for a set by Man Man. This sextet of hirsute loonies dressed in white outfits and sporting headbands proceeded to play the holy hell out of about four keyboards, sax, trumpet, drums and a garage of kitchen sink percussion – creating a truly joyful noise. It was like a polka band had been fed crack-laced kielbasa, then been convinced it needed to do “Bohemian Rhapsody” right now. It was beautiful. Man Man would vacillate between Steve Reich minimalist passages to full monkey-style operating mania. Go see Man Man next time the mothership lands, for they truly are the Band Band.

Thursday 3/16 Six Feet Under at the Darkroom

Man, I love the Darkroom. There is no pretense about it. The place is a wreck, the music is hard and loud (but somehow, not too loud, despite the more extreme varieties of metal manifested there) and the all-ages crowd is generally one of the nicest and most enthusiastic in town. When Six Feet Under hit the stage, and Chris Barnes (also of Death metal poster band Cannibal Corpse) let off one of his trademark rumble-of-Vesuvius roars, the place went nuts. I consulted with the lead singer of the previous band Sworn Enemy on classifying Six Feet Under (there are at least 375 documented strains of heavy metal on the books) He offered the term “power metal” and I think it fits. Barnes and crew tore through the Six Feet Under and Cannibal Corpse catalogs, always maintaining a fat groovy bottom end to keep the punches swinging. Kudos to the staff of the Darkroom for letting the kids be kids in the mosh pit, but also acting with lightning speed when things got out of hand.

In fact, later that night, a drunken attorney at the Red Star evidently was trying to impress the senior partners also present and tried to start an altercation with a guy that was just hanging out to see The Woggles. It’s a telling thing about our culture when a bunch of tattooed, shirtless, moshing metal heads, elbowing each other in the face with adolescent abandon, can conduct themselves with more decorum than some jerk in a suit.

Anyway, Six Feet Under was awesome, high octane, physical tsunamis of sound that I was sure was going to be the sonic highlight of the evening.

Thursday, 3/16 The Woggles at Red Star

That is until I witnessed The Woggles. They are one of those legendary garage rock bands that I’ve seen mentioned on listservs for years, but never heard. When I arrived, the Woggles had already broken the (purely conceptual, at the Red Star) barrier between the stage and the audience. Fortified with extra long mic and guitar cables, the band assaulted the audience from every angle (on top of the bar, out the front door, wrapped around the women in the audience) with their lethal 60’s inspired garage rock. The guys barely took a breath between songs, launching another twist-o-matic wonders from the way-back machine. I have witnessed a blot of garage rock in my day, and I have to say The Woggles deserve the hype fostered upon them. No thuggish posturing like the greaser set, no corny faux-western shtick like a lot of Rockabilly bands; just 1000% showmanship and energy. Amazing stuff. Judging by the thin crowd, only die-hard concert rats and a few drunken lawyers witnessed possibly the finest show of the festival.