THE SWEET, FANCY SPACE PEOPLE, AND DANTE VS. ZOMBIES ON THURSDAY FEB. 3RD AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BOULEVARD, LOS ANGELES. 8:00PM/ $22/ 18+

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Halloween Swim Team sounded fairly cacophonous through the storefront windows, but the Monolators insisted the door be shut for their aggressive psych-rock, lest blameless strollers on Sunset be caught in the fusillade and begin to yell for the cops. A onetime trio once shrunk to the husband-and-wife team of Eli and Mary Chartkoff but now swollen to a quintet, the band handed out cardboard keys to Thursday’s release of their digital EP Ruby I’m Changing My Number. The crowd, now rapt and judging from a whole new set of standards, were delighted all over again with this brief and forceful turn.

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I caught up with some L.A. RECORD peeps at the Echo’s No Culture show last week, but not before catching up with Lucky Dragons, owners of one of my few whole-souled enthusiasms on the current SoCal scene. The rara avis duo of Luke Fischbeck and Sara Rara don’t so much give performances of their Minkowski Space postrock as collaborate with the audience and they did so tonight, passing out various tone-making apparatus to rapt ones sitting semicircle on the concrete floor. They view the craft of song the same way long-gone late-‘70s postpunk experimentalists the Swell Maps did—as a mere conventional pretext for astonishing ventures into the arrangement of pure skronk.

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As bassist and co-vocalist of nonpareil Britrock jesters the Sweet, Steve Priest provided the wobbly floor beneath megabuck Top Ten capers like ‘Little Willie,’ ‘Fox on the Run’ and ‘Ballroom Blitz.’ After spurning the temptation to take his old band back out on the road until 2006, Priest finally answers ‘Uh-huh’ to the musical question, ‘Are you ready, Steve?’ This interview by Ron Garmon.

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Orders from the Fire Marshal sent the marathon Fauxchella festival packing from the announced Traction Ave. venue earlier in the week, but by showtime on Good Friday organizers had moved the event to gamier precincts many blocks away. Hangar 1018 is beloved of the downtown party set and I know the space well, having wandered along its sketchy and verminous stretch of S. Santa Fe many times in various states of hallucinogenic inebriation. Inside, instead of the usual haul of faux-fur and near-naked ladies, were a couple hundred gamboling on the fragments of their Eastside Cool. I was waved past the door by promoters spoke cheerily of the ultraviolence they’d already visited upon everyone else inquiring after The List.

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