If Ty Segall and Tim Presley’s White Fence are our era’s New York Dolls and Velvets, then Portland’s Welcome Home Walker could easily be our Brownsville Station: comparatively clean but subversively hip Americana about girls, parties, and, um… taking baths (see how clean this is?), too raw to be the Georgia Satellites but too aw-shucks to be garage. Singer and guitarist Devin Clark’s voice (which stayed too far in the background during his stint in the far more Dolls-like Soda Pop Kids), had the kind of hoarse adrenaline-fueled Mark Arm delivery that announces itself as a party from the get-go, and that, combined with his raw guitar riffs, might obscure the fact that some of these lyrics are damned clever. Besides the aforementioned bath opus “Suds” (which is exactly what it sounds like—perhaps the best rock song about bathing since “Splish Splash”), I can’t get enough of “It’s Not Enough,” a Costello-ey almost-ballad about women who “pull away like you never needed anything/but Choo Choo, you know you got all of your steam from me.” And perhaps my favorite is “Listen Up, Mac,” secretly advice to a girl whose chemical consumption is making her too skeletal to be sexy: “Uh uh, String Bean, just keep your nose clean.” Diction isn’t exactly Clark’s goal with the vocals—luckily the awesome vinyl package comes with lyrics and hand-detailed chunks of other albums pasted on! Who knows, your copy might have Michael Jackson and the Ninja Turtles.

-Dan Collins

A Little Night Orgy: Kim Fowley once famously recommended Hollywood as a place for the cynical who’ve fouled their nests elsewhere. While it’s impossible not to marvel at the agglomeration of shitheels hoofing it in this basin, few can remain cynical around the fellow’s female entourage, most of which were running rampant at his Lipstick Orgy extravaganza at the Knit last Wednesday, the 20th. The tall and glowering host, father of a hundred chart hits across the decades and busy these days as ever, left briefing details to Christie Blood, the entirely delightful mistress-of-ceremonies for further cozening. Fowley’s shows always remind me of mid-1960s A.I. P. joint Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine, in which Vincent Price attempts to conquer the world with an elite force of pulchritudinous chickbots molded to every kink in ruling-class chauvinistic taste. On the bill were Beat Killers, the Fabulous Miss Wendy and Zombelle, the latter a lone gothgirl performing “blasphemous doo-wop.” Scattered around the venue were scene-folk I’ve been tripping over for years in one likely venue or other, names less familiar than the same old faces grinning atop ever-gaudier hipster-wear. Anon came Fowley, laying on a little of his Crazy White Man improvisatory chant-rock, followed by lots of lascivious q&a with a nubile self-admitted virgin. I left before the lesbian slave auction, chary of taking on yet another commitment known to be wearing in the extreme.

Another Friday, Another Raid: Aesthetes of the post-noir hardboiled crime movie show too little love for Michael Winner’s The Mechanic, a nifty 1972 bit of hitman agonistes featuring an uneasy male bond between Charlie Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent —the verbose likes of David Mamet might well have given both nuts to author. This marvel was somewhere into its fourth reel at the New Bev the following Friday night when a text bade me meet various L.A. RECORDers at a downtown speakeasy. I hauled myself away from Mr. Majestyk and passed on a planned after-movie inquiry into just how the pluperfect fuck a tiny storefront like Echo Curio was going to get away with a performance by killer hodads Double Naught Spy Car with anything short of structural damage. (Accounts from survivors are welcome and should be appended below.) While we await reports, I can only relate this upstairs eyrie throbbed with some stupendously DJ’d hip-hop in the very few minutes my arrival preceded that of the Fire Department and grim-looking LAPD officers. Sight of the taxpayer-funded mold and spit of Kevin Tighe, Randolph Mantooth and the two zombies from Adam-12 putting an end to my night was anything but new to me. I thought the full helmeted regalia on the firemen a bit hammy, as was the big red LAFD engine flashing and howling down Broadway. As we left, cops were detaining the doorman. It had the exact feel of a clownshow staged for tourists, like Yakov Smirnoff’s run in The Producers, still with two weeks left at the William Castle Dinner Theatre in scenic East WeHo.

Red Lightning: Cynics might ask what anyone expects might come of running an unlicensed party in more-or-less plain sight downtown. Well, the habits of J.Q. Law are scarcely inscrutable either and his minions insert themselves into the damnedest contexts, like in the form of Sheriff’s deputies answering a noise call at the Red Lightning Temple fundraiser last Saturday night. The cause for jollification is construction of a huge and stupefying interactive art project for Burning Man 2009 involving the Tesla coil that merrily spat at passersby in the chill space. Things were just as frisky on the dance floor and in the Jacuzzi (where you really get to know your neighbor), as both were wracked by the action-adventure DJ pulsations of FatFinger, Jesse Wright and many more. Held at a onetime cowboy-music recording studio nestled high in some remote Malibu canyon, this marathon event was all but over by the time the noise complaint hastened on the chill portion of the program. That’s as far as the bad vibes went, Burner point-people being arch conflict-resolutionists. The near-impossibility of getting a fire engine out that way on a night not illumined by total incineration no doubt figured into their calculations. Needless to say, it was a first-rate party.

March Fourth into Memorial Day: Sunday was for sleeping late and a bit of the old groan-and-creak as my morning pot of coffee stretched into the late afternoon. The evening was already far advanced by the time I wandered onto a rowdy Whittier Boulevard, spiffy in purple ruffles and black velvet, to totter in an oncoming cubensis haze to Soto Street, where I met a number of chummy fellows eager to sell me cigarettes or buy my lighter. The 251 bus dropped me a fine stretch of the legs from SmashLabs, a longtime underground partypad situated in a neighborhood with close to no bipedal activity at this hour. The soundproofing is so good I didn’t hear the blistering hullabaloo that is March Fourth Marching Band. This Portland mishigas has been a favorite of mine since their lunatic Fellini parade through the campgrounds on Saturday afternoon of Lightning in a Boittle 2007. They’ve matured into a kind of Romilar-based version of the Bar-Kays, all loopy soul-horns and disco-squawk. It went on and on, the band up way into afterhours before some fairgrounds gig or other. DJ Wolfie led the dancefloor capers and I dallied long, chatting with charming ladies in this bastion of the old pre-hassle days, when a lone hillbilly had room to maneuver.

—Ron Garmon

Thursday’s Port O’Brien show at Spaceland was a fun showcase of two bands from up north.  Hailing from Portland, The Builders and the Butchers took opening duties and put on an interesting set.  I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they garner a lot of low-fi Decemberists comparisons (specifically for their instrumentation and lyrical musings.)  I found their songwriting and overall presentation to be quite enjoyable.  The quick stage setup allowed for a couple chain-smoked cigarettes and before we knew it Port O’Brien was on.  This Oakland five piece has gotten a lot attention lately for lead singer Van Pierszalowski’s commercial-fishing-off-the-coast-of-Alaska upbringing (this is the first summer he hasn’t spent on a boat in a decade – I guess it makes for a cool story.)  Spaceland wasn’t packed – not too shabby for a weeknight – but Van had to keep pleading for people to fill up the front.  Their set was much livelier than a lot of their recorded material and they brought up a couple extraneous musicians for various songs.  They saved their single “I Woke Up Today” for the very end and passed out an array of percussive instruments for people to play along.  This song alone was worth my evening’s time spent at Spaceland.  I know it’s lame to plug the single, but if you haven’t heard this band yet, go find this song – you’ll be singing it all day.

– James Cartwright

Named “like the sport,” the bike-riding vegans of Hockey drove down from Portland with no air conditioning and spent their first visit to California playing a college, a club on Hollywood Blvd and a deserted bar in South Orange County before ripping Silver Lake a dance-filled new one. Hockey took the Spaceland stage after a schizophrenic band that featured sunglasses-and-tribal-tattoo-clad white rappers dressed like basketball players from the 1970s and a giant banana costume that ran around thrusting its phallic lower end into shocked bystanders. A relieved audience swayed through Hockey’s first song before infectious jams like “Too Fake” and “Preacher” turned all the stagnant feet into a full-on dance party. With the singer wearing a baggy, one-sleeved San Francisco Giants jersey and an unflappable drummer donning giant isolation headphones throughout the whole set, the scruffy Northwest natives’ hearty funk influence coerced even the guy in a Bape hoodie to jump around and sing along. And although the room cleared out after a sweat-filled set, their earworm-heavy, self-released album, Mind Chaos, was used as the house music for the rest of the night, ensuring everyone left with a case of repe-tune-itis.

— Sarah Bennett