The night promised a triple serving of spicy sweet women. The dark feminine kind. A 49% chance of leotard**.

Our sure leotard bet, Tearist’s Yasmine Kittles, was detained in NY and couldn’t make it—announced a burly, balding nerd man at Echo Curio’s neighboring liquor store, with a sense of authority and restrained lust. Kittles’ bandmate William Stangeland Menchaca presented Terrorist instead, a living room project with his roommate. Up against the strong female performers with velvety vocal abilities and ladylike swagger, the guys screaming, face down on the floor kicking tantrums, took on a major dude vibe. Gender politics aside, Terrorist’s abrasiveness found its groove as the short performance reached crescendo. We began bobbing, realizing this was a dance beat run through a garbage compactor.

Terrorist

Shan Beaste’s leotard compensated Kittles’ absence with a panty line higher than Jennifer Grey’s in Dirty Dancing. Shan Beaste is Zombelle, an unpredictable performer fond of costumes and face paint. Beaste took her blind grandma draws way outside the lines look to the scary clown brink. Recently at Show Cave she wore an Egyptian cat costume-from-a-bag and painted her face black, which made her teeth look sharp. The scary jazz dance instructor transformation presented a new iteration of Zombelle, the vision, visiting from another unique parallel universe. That big starburst cluster tattoo coming out of her neck remains a fierce statement with its location. But the fact it’s colorful girly stars and not daggers and skulls adds something playful, softening the edge.

Zombelle

Aside from fun dissecting her fashion, it’s understandable why Zombelle’s music has been tagged New Weird America. The first Weird emerged during the 1960s, Greenwich Village, during the folk scene that admired Harry Smith’s old-time record collection. The New Weird revives old with a futuristic vision. Zombelle is a soul singer from The 5th Element. Simplicity applied to crazy instruments. Remove the 40 echoes from her voice, replace Stefan Nelson’s wave drum with a bucket and HowardAmb’s q-chord with an autoharp and we land at some 1940‘s late night underground scene. Her slow ballads demand patience and attention, and the upbeat songs, such as “Go To Her,” flirt with a handsome darkness I’d like to meet on the dancefloor. Then she bangs a gong!

Zola Jesus

Nika Roza claims that Zola Jesus is now a band, but I’ve only seen her solo + sampler and it suits the experience just fine. Sure, the beats could sound better produced live, spread on multiple instruments, yadah yadah. Little Roza commands a room’s attention using just her voice and any nearby object she can stand on. Tonight, she used a chair. Moving it from one place to another, she hopped on and off it from time to time. At one point she slipped deep inside the crowd and kneeled. They absorbed her like an egg yolk. Then she crawled back to the front. A symbolic birth or prophetic awakening. Some men stood outside the window placing their hands on the glass as if she were a doll behind a case.

Zola Jesus

Zola Jesus is post-punk Christina Aguilera for these people who gather preciously attentive. Her operatic range dreams of abandoned cathedrals to drag a scarf across. She does pop but—just as Zombelle (and the absent Tearist)—turns the standard form inside out, scratching some runs in its stockings.

—Daiana Feuer (words + photo)

** ((100% ÷ 3 girls = 33.333% chance of one leotard) ÷ 2=16.666% or half a chance of leotard) + 33.333%)= 49% to assume it’s more than likely at least one girl will wear a leotard…

Download: Zombelle “Go To Her”

Here’s a folk song from outer space. Glitches scratch their way out from beneath shakers and handclaps, letting in gusts of wind that rattle garbage cans. Zombelle’s voice bewitches; just how a great black hole’s perfume lures passing objects into its infinite abyss.

The dynamics of the set went from spoken vocals over quiet, sway-inducing basslines & jazzy drums to ground-shaking subharmonic chords & four on the floor with frenzied screaming. The crowd responded to the jet engine uproar by absorbing the eager lead singer, Nolen, into their ranks like an amoeba absorbing sonic sustenance. After the din of ‡ ended, Zombelle got set up. She and her collaborator were decked out like Vampire Hunter D. With a kaoss pad noise wash underneath, Zombelle gesticulated hurling reverb drenched sixties truisms. A broken guitar lay on the floor, plugged in I suppose. Most people stood in awe at what could be called an avante-Zombelle set. I picked up a couple of Double Dagger 7″s before leaving, both of which sounded great even with my stereo’s limited volume.

—Richard Seymour

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

So what has Vivian Girls been up to?
Katy (bass/vocals): Well, we’ve been playing a lot of shows, recording an acoustic video for ifyoumakeit.com, mailing out our new records, and silk-screening shirts for tour.
Cassie (guitar/vocals): Katy and I are also both about to graduate from college, so the past few months have been both really fun and stressful.
K: And we’re about to play a bunch of awesome shows before we leave on tour, two of which are with Abe Vigoda, so that should be awesome. I accidentally booked our tour starting a day too early, because it turns out all of my finals are on the 13th, but on the 13th we’re going to be in Asheville playing with the Bananas.
Yay! The Bananas!
C: The Bananas have been one of my favorite bands since I was 16. Playing a show with them has been a dream of mine since I started playing music. I can’t wait.
K: Yeah I’m excited, too. We’re also playing with them in Richmond. We’re also going on another tour in august. We’re going to go to Chicago and back with Crystal Stilts.
And Frankie, you recently joined Crystal Stilts?
Frankie (drums/vocals): Yup, I’m drumming for them now so its double duty these couple weeks before tour.
Do you feel like you come out of a scene of sorts in Brooklyn?
F: In a way it’s a “scene” because we enjoy playing shows with our friends and we do it as much as possible. There may be similarities in sound. It’s kind of like when multiple visual artists share a common space. Inspiration and ideas can’t help but be thrown around—in turn, affecting each other’s work.
K: Well, the bands we play with—like Crystal Stilts and caUSE co-MOTION!—they’re friends first, and then bands-we-know second. For example, Cassie and I have known the guitar player of caUSE co-MOTION! since before we even had our bands, and I think we all just happen to have similar taste and that comes out in our music.
C: I think the main thing that unites us all in the Brooklyn scene is that we all appreciate each other, and try to make interesting music, of any genre, that we’re proud of and happy to share with our friends.
On your myspace there is a picture entitled “we live here” and a commenter refers to it as the “stuffed animal house.” What’s the story behind that place?
F: Oh! We don’t really live there. Cassie and I live in Brooklyn and Katy lives in New Jersey. That’s just a wacky spot we found in Detroit on tour.
C: It’s a large-scale street-long art project called the Heidelberg Project and it took years and years to make. In Detroit, there are blocks and blocks of abandoned houses, and someone just used it to make these huge sculptures. He painted faces on every house, or covered it with stuffed animals or other objects. There were also all these abandoned fields next to the houses in which he made sculptures of taxis and totem poles of junk. He did this to an ENTIRE STREET in Detroit.
I heard you have a good Pensacola story.
F: We do? Oh yeah! How I got a new wardrobe! It’s creepy, really. An old lady passed away, and the family didn’t have money to clean out the house. So the kids in Pensacola have slowly been picking apart this woman’s house, which was left totally intact. There was an entire living room filled—about six feet high over your head—with amazing vintage clothes. They were all a little moldy, but… you know! I think we have a picture somewhere. You can’t really find me in the chaos—it’s like Where’s Waldo!
K: I actually had to kick the door open! It was the first time I’d ever done that…I felt like John McClane.
Have you kicked down any doors since?
K: Well, once you start…
What releases will Vivian Girls have with you on tour?
F: Our LP that is coming out on Mauled by Tigers and the Plays With Dolls seven inch that just came out. But the one I’m most excited about is our 3-song self-recorded 7″ in on Woodsist. Hopefully we’ll have some copies of that with us, as well. They’re on the album too, but they’re recorded in a different way. I really love the way the recordings we did ourselves came out, so I’m pretty excited about that 7″.
C: They’re definitely a lot more lo-fi.
F: Originally we recorded them as a reference. They were not intended to be a recording we were going to release or anything. We recorded everything through my little practice amp, in my old house, and we didn’t have a kick drum. It’s funny because I play bass on one of the songs that I don’t even play bass on anymore. Katy plays bass on it now, and I play drums. It sounds a lot more garage-y than the album, which I like. It’s a little bit dirtier, and little sadder, I think. It’s also wonkier. But I like that. Quite honestly, I love playing drums the most—I love it so much. But I like a little variety. For kicks, we’ve been switching it up a lot more these days, which is nice for me.
Is self-recording something you’ll do more of in the future?
F: I hope so. I think in the future we’ll try and reach more of a middle ground. I think we want to record ourselves, but do a slightly better job of it. And have more mics—all we used was the built-in computer mic—and take more time with it. That’s what’s nice about recording yourself; you have all the time in the world. I guess we’d like to find a balance between recording in a studio, and singing into the tiny mic on an iBook. I just think it’s really nice to have total control over the way your songs are going to sound.
So when you were doing the house recording, you didn’t anticipate it being released?
F: Nah. It was just for us. I think we put it up on our website, and people really liked it, and then our friend Jeremy asked if he could put it out. I’m really happy that they are going to be out there. They became practically different songs than the versions on the LP, which I’m fine with. I think I hold the home recordings a bit closer to my heart. I also feel like sometimes things can be lost in re-recording. For example, you can record something and maybe you don’t mean it to be released at any point, but it’s a new song and it’s fresh, and it captures something at the time. And sometimes I think those things can be lost when you take it into a studio.
C: Our studio experience was amazing, though. Jeremy Scott, our recording engineer, is a great guy and our recording session was totally relaxed and fun. He did a great job. We are all really happy with our album and can’t wait for its release!

THE VIVIAN GIRLS WITH POCAHAUNTED, BLACK BLACK, WHITE AND THE WRITING AND ZOMBELLE ON FRI., MAY 22, AT THE SMELL, 247 S. MAIN ST., LOS ANGELES. 9 PM / $5 / $5 HAIRCUTS AND VEGAN FOOD BY CROPS AND RAWBERS / ALL AGES. THESMELL.ORG.