LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 51

Tony Afanador They Might Be Giants, but they're smaller than Ike or is that Fred Mertz 7 Is it art or is it Memorex Psychic TV stretches the point. Joe Wood doesn't get the hint. Woods hair-raising screams and haunting, Morrison-style vocals, serving to emphasize the band's psychedelic, nightmarish tales of woe perfectly. TSOL is a well-rounded, cohesive, powerful and versatile unit. It virtually defies classification.

Junkyard's set was an excellent, furnacelike blast of red-hot rockin blues, ACDC-style. Steve Augustine through the back of the hall in a desperate attempt at infamy. Just kidding. So whats left? Two stacks of television sets with a giant screen center stage showing a film of softcore sexual fantasy and hallucinatory mind-rot with a pre-recorded soundtrack and an occasional live voiceover by the shaman himself. It was rife with symbolism straight out of Psych 101 are many rooms in my black house), and Magick for Beginners (a candelabrum served as stage lighting), and music leaning more toward the Throbbing Gristle days of Genesis P.

Orridge (dull and occasionally torturous) I still couldnt help enjoying it. Not just because the show so enthralled and confused everyone around me, but because no matter how dark and upsetting he tries to be, there is always something bright and optimistic about it all. No, really. His hints at praising Lucifer are not so much about devil worship as they are about breaking the shackles of Christian guilt and achieving a personal inner freedom. His visual attempts at portraying Lilith (queen of the night and a demon; of the kabalah) kept turning into Layla (among other things, a redemption symbol) all of this, of course, perfect for Easter eve.

If he lets it slip into the sopho-moric on occasion, we shall forgive, and look forward to his next incarnation sure to be as twisted as this one. S.C. Frank The Church, Roxy, March 23. The last time this Australian quartet came through town they seemed down and dispirited. No wonder: Theyd just been dropped by their record company.

This time around with a new label, the hit album Starfish and even a song (Under the Milky Way) on the radio they played a hard-hitting, confident set that proved why theyve been able to maintain a fiercely loyal cult following over the years. Though the Church dont sing about Australia their impressionistic, pastel sounds dont lend themselves to such specifics they are imbued with that uniquely straightforward, Antipodean spirit which comes from having cut their teeth on a grueling pub circuit where the sound, as opposed to the image, is king. The scene was not without its indulgences (e.g., Marty Willson-Pipers guitar-smashing at show's end). What will these kids think of next? Throwing TVs into swimming pools from hotel-room windows? Entertaining the GTOs backstage? The mind reels. Cary Darling It was an ambiguous, rich horror.

Though classically trained, Christian has a rock background too (hes played with Victoria Williams, Leaving Trains, What Is This and Robbie Robertson, among others), and its often the sheer volume that makes his experimental music so effective and potentially popular (sort of) like Glenn Brancas stuff, its visceral, proud and exciting, unlike so many other attempts in this vein. New music needs that kind of hubris, and given the opportunity, the kids could get into it. John Payne Dream Syndicate, Music Machine, April 1. This show pissed me oft. Dream Syndicate is one of the best live bands in L.A.

probably the world and here they are after years and years, still playing dinky little clubs. This is not just another straight-ahead rock roll band with cool influences. From the moment these guys walk onstage, they lose themselves in that intuitive sense of unity that happens when four players become capable of melding their collective talents. Within three songs, everyone in the room was drawn into that eerie, hypnotic state that only the Syndicate can conjure. Steve Wynn and Paul Cutler are a perfectly matched pair: Cutlers eyes roll back in six-string bliss while Wynn exudes cool self-assurance until he allows himself to explode in a frighteningly frenzied solo.

This band doesnt reach out with rabble-rousing, crowd-pleasing anthems, it pulls you in with a deeply internalized, concentrated energy. A Dream Syndicate show is always an emotionally exhausting and exhilarating experience. Perhaps the problem is that they're too good at what they do. It seems like most people want to escape from themselves. How can a band pander to those people when its whole focus invites people to escape within themselves? Maybe thats why theyre still playing dinky little clubs.

And maybe thats why Im pissed off. Janiss Garza They Might Be Giants, Club Lingerie, March 25. Its amazing, and refreshing, that a critical sector and a buying public that are so often shortsighted or lazy have become entranced with They Might Be Giants, instead of dismissing them as a novelty act. Surely, two grown men (lets call them John 1 and John 2) who have a lifetime of being called quirky ahead of them could easily tumble into the Dave FrishbergRandy Newman miasma of funny, one-joke, pop radio favorites that evaporate as soon as Tiffany puts out a new single. But They Might Be Giants are a real band, with real songs about real issues (Pop Culture Killed My Dog not a little chilling, huh?) and a real accordion and a REAL BIG STICK.

They even have a real hit single, Don't Let's Start, thats garnered real words from Rocks Greatest Cliches: infectious is the culprit in this case. And their songs are real short sos not to lose the attention of the real enthusiastic hordes of real nerds (not the $250 horn-rimmed pianos types) who sort of redefine the Pogo in order to keep up with TMBG. The guys are so charming, so er, real onstage, that I couldnt help thinking that all that postpunk anger didnt go whooshing back into the black hole (energy can neither be created nor destroyed) whence it came, but was stuffed, knocking at the sides and desperate to get out, into John 2s accordion. Which is perfectly appropriate and, yes, quirky. Arion Berger Psychic Television, Variety Arts Center, April 2.

Overheard at the bar: Yeah, I got to meet Genesis P. Orridge; he was godlike. I introduced him to my macrame owl. These guys put out volumes and volumes of stuff without one concrete idea. I love these guys; I have all their records.

couple of pretentious English assholes. Wheres Alex? You just don't understand, do you? They are not here to entertain us, theyre just doing a ritual for themselves. We are just voyeurs. This is just too boring, loud, repetitious and self-indulgent. Look at me here, look at me on video, look at my naked wife on video.

This is way intense do you think you understand it?" I really liked the first band. The T-shirts are cool. I. like the video part where the guy eats Christs head I hope he doesnt rise again. It's just so hip to be chaotic.

Polly anne D.I.'s, Coconut Teaszer, March 23. The D.I.s, unsung heroes of local rock roll, sauntered jauntily on stage and proceeded to demonstrate the pith and power and pleasure that signing a blood pact with the devil provides: Tis 10 years since singer Axxel G. Reese and drummer Dave Drive first assaulted audiences as the Gears, and that experience and affection for what they do is blinding. Amply supported by Johnny Rays frolicsome rip-rock bass, Venice Georges feral guitar and Frenchies war-cry harp, Reese gave a performance on a par with the best of rock rolls frontmen. He stalks the stage with the relentless momentum of archetypal punk rock, the restrained, deadly cool of the bluesman and his own charming, personal style.

One of the few locals acts not actively ass-kissing (not seeking the dubious blessing of major-label interest), these drill instructors play guileless, gutbucket club rock a-way beyond the competition. The guys pushed the recruits to the limit with a variety of material, from the Gears classic Wasting Time (featuring Axxels awe-inspiring whistle-lead) to a savagely rocked up I Think Were Alone to Frenchies atomic blue Sweet Home Chicago, and showed once and for all that theyre not only among L.A.'s best, they're also among the most honest, credible and original. When youve wearied of the posers and roots fence-straddlers, go out to a D.I.s show and ball, baby, ball. A-1 guaranteed groove. Jonny Whiteside Hans Christian, Rika Ohara, A downtown loft, March 25.

Hans Christian is a German cellistcomposer whose music owes at least some small debt to Stockhausen, Holger Czukay and Eberhard Weber, if you can picture that. In order to produce multilayered musical environments, Christian, like Stockhausen and Czukay, dedicates himself to the hybridization of world musics with pure sound (with a focus on process), in a simultaneous conscious extension of the European classical tradition, like Weber (mainly via his solo cello improvisations). Christian and his partner, ar-tistchoreographer Rika Ohara, offered a program at their downtown studio that suggested several fruitful areas of exploration. While it remains to be seen whether Christians music will achieve a singular, identifiable stamp, the fact that hes doing it at all is encouraging and, in light of the whole cross-fertilization concept thats pushing so many kinds of music forward now (rap, scratch, your Zorns, Reichs and Rileys, even), it seems a logical and even shrewd approach to music-making. Christian mixed it up in solo cello pieces (as in Behold the Fire and Blind Stab," with teases at Casals, jazz and flamenco), and more textural synthradiotapeeffects soundscapes, such as Totalle Angst, an ominous, heavy piece incorporating cello, bits of a Russian radio broadcast, Christians mouth-effects-through-delay-tootlebug, and Oharas traumatic danceconvulsions and oblique slide projections.

TSOL, Junkyard, Scream, April 2. This is a biased review. Ive seen TSOL umpteen times over the years, and they rarely put on a bad show. With the exception of a few numbers, nearly every song darkly races along to a climactic and explosive finish, and it-is an exciting thing to watch. But there's more here than just a good balls-out hard-rock band.

TSOL are quite capable of moving from one style to another without blinking an eye (witness their cover of the Box Tops The Letter, or their eerie, jazzlike original, Good Morning Blues), all the while retaining that driving and abrasive rock roll in-your-face swipe. Like the lyrics of their main influences, the Doors, True Sounds of Libertys recurrently deal with the darker sides of life, accented by Joe Psychic Television, Variety Arts Center, April 2. Psychic Television is not Psychic TV. Rather, it's a stripped-down, hardcore version of it. Gone were Psy TVs great poppish, psychedelic songs like Roman Interzone and Good Vibrations.

Missing were the dancers, dream machines and impromptu action that made TV-shows in the past such happenings. Missing was a band. 11 Is j. A WEEKLY April 8-14, 1988.