Pete Bagge, in his famous Hate comix, once referred to the Croc as the "Fetid Malodorous Café", which is a little harsh. I will vouch for it being the hottest venue, temperature-wise, in which I’ve ever attended a show. Ventilation consists of a large fan pointed above the heads of those in the band room. If you’re situated just right, you might feel the faintest of breezes across the top of your scalp. Otherwise, the only cooling off strategy that I’ve found to be effective in the least is the drinking of copious amounts of adult beverages very quickly, since the ambient temp of the room will actually cause your beverage to boil off if you’re not fast enough.

Opening the show were local band Charming Snakes. That’s local as in Seattle-by-way-of-Austin, but hey, I think Science Girl is the only born and raised local in town anymore. We’re all transplants here, of one kind or another, so let’s not get off on the wrong foot with our opening band, shall we? Alright then. Consisting of two males (guitars and vocal) and two women (bass and drums), Charming Snakes cranked out what I’ve come to think of as the default indie sound, a mish-mash of post-punk and garage sounds. While I haven’t heard the new album yet, I do have an EP they put out last year, and based on their set last night I’d have to say that what they do translates much better on CD than it does live. Not really a fair assessment, though, since opening shows is such a thankless job and there really wasn’t much of an audience, at that point, for them to play off of. Bassist Lacey Swain said that that was OK, since they were really playing for the bar-cam, anyway. (The Croc has installed a closed-circuit video system so the hipsters can sit back in the bar, drink their PBRs while exuding wave upon wave of bored disinterest and still keep track of what’s happening in the band room until the headliners come on, at which point they can get up off their ironic asses and actually be in the same room where the band is. Then they exude that same disinterest in the proceedings, except now they’re standing directly in front of the people who came to see and hear music.) Also, openers generally get screwed by the sound op; Reuben Mendez’s vocal were lost in the mix, for the most part. So perhaps this wasn’t the best introduction to the live Charming Snakes experience.

Next up: Master Musicians of Bukkake. I’m still trying to figure out what I thought of their set. Let me set the scene for you. Science Girl and I stepped out to the main room to get a little air between sets, so the band had already taken the stage by the time we went back in. What first caught my eye was the bass player; he was wearing a full-head mask of a deer, topped with a child’s Native American-style war bonnet made of red, white, and blue feathers. The vocalist, a large man, was clad in a camouflage jumpsuit and what appeared to be a squashed drum major’s shako; the shirtless drummer sported a sort of Sideshow Bob wig; the two guitarists, while slightly more traditionally attired, were working the clashing polyester patterns look. I think there was another keyboard player back behind the stage-right guitarist/keyboardist, although all I could really see was what seemed to be a floating cowboy hat.

I took this as a promising sign.

The music? Well… it’s a sort of tribal sub-Beefheart neo-dada quasi art-funk. Which is not an entirely accurate description, but it’s as close as I’m going to get. The set was essentially one long piece, although you could break it down into “songs” and “noodling about, looking for a groove”, too. The bits one could nail down as songs were generally quite enjoyable, and the noodly parts were annoying and self-indulgent. C'est la vie. Since there was no actual break between songs, when the stage-right guitarist broke a string about a third of the way through the set he soldiered on with just five strings. No one seemed to notice. Since most of the vocals were done in a child-like falsetto and then treat with various flavors of echo, I couldn’t really tell what the songs were about. Aside from the “poo-poo pee-pee ca-ca” chant, of course; that was fairly self-evident. Overall, the ratio of song to noodle was generally acceptable, so things worked out OK.

As it turns out, MMoB are a fairly loose collection of musicians. One of the core members, Randall Dunn, produced Kinski’s Alpine Static album. Since this show was the release party for said disc, that’ll make a nice segue to the discussion of Kinski’s set. I love it when a piece comes together like that.

All those hipsters hanging in the back bar came crowding into the band room for the headliners, and quite a few of them were throwing rock& roll devil horn signs (thusly) at the stage by the second song of the set. Yep. This is the point where I say that Kinski were rockin’ out with, uh, various appendages out. Guitarist Chris Martin says that they’ll be changing the set list around quite a bit on this tour, so if you go see them the show may be quite different from what they played Saturday night. Given that I can’t write about some putative show that you may or may not go to (and that hasn’t happened yet, in any case), how’s about I write about the show we saw instead? Yeah? OK. So, what we saw was a leaner, tighter Kinski. Gone are the more drifting, ambient pieces, in favor of the loud and speedy. This meant that the set leaned heavily on Alpine Static (and c'mon, it is the new album), with “Semaphore” from Airs Above Your Station, and a couple of other tunes I didn’t recognize, thrown in to sort of round things out.

When I’ve seen Kinski previously, they were fairly static. Chris jumped around a little, but everybody else pretty much stayed where they were. Not so Saturday. Both guitarists (the aforementioned Martin and Matthew Reid-Schwartz) were quite animated, with Chris bobbing and weaving like Ali in his prime and Matthew stalking his side of the stage like an angry badger. Meanwhile, Lucy Atkinson was working the cool-chick-bassplayer Cousin It look, and drummer Barrett Wilke… well, I’ll be honest, I couldn’t really see him. I could sure as hell hear him, though. Let’s face it: with Kinski, the focus is mainly on the guitars. Lucy gets a little more leeway, as she can pull out the E bow from time to time. Wilke is kinda stuck keeping time, and he does so with Swiss-like accuracy. His playing is never really fancy, but if he were screwing up it would be really obvious. I tip my metaphorical cap to him.

As I said earlier, this show was all about the rockin’. Guitars were thick and swarming throughout. The highlights, for me, were “The Party Which You Know Will Be Heavy” (even better live than on CD – apparently it’s Martin’s fave of the moment, and it shows) and the surprise encore rendition of The Ramones’ “I’m Against It”(!), with Chris Martin vocals no less. “Hiding Drugs In The Temple” came off really well, too. Well, hell, everything did. Even the somewhat weak vocal track from the Semaphore EP, “Point That Thing Somewhere Else”, was brought into line with the new scorched-earth Kinski policy, sounding as if it would have easily fit in somewhere on the Nuggets compilation.

All in all, a swell night out, if occasionally a little odd. Let me sum up: the jury is still out on Charming Snakes; MMoB, while hit and miss, were mostly hit; and Kinski just flat out rocked my ass off. There you go.

(Kinski are currently touring the US and Canada. Are they coming to your town? Check here.)