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Blogs / Lounge Act / November 2008 / Theater meets Rock tonight

Theater meets Rock tonight

When costume-rockers GWAR comes to town, they rarely have any competition playing at other venues that comes close to the crazed stage show this crew of musicians, artists and dancers puts together. That isn't the case tonight, though.

If you've never seen GWAR (short for "God What an Awful Racket"), you're missing out. The "band" was initially launched as a marketing experiment by a bunch of Virginia Commonwealth University students, but 20 years later, GWAR is still going strong. The group fictionally consists of a crew of interplanetary warriors who were descended from aliens who were stranded in Antarctica, and who have come to Earth to either slaughter the humans or make them the aliens sex slaves. Sounds like a pretty good set-up for a comic book or movie, right? Well, it also makes for a metallic racket that fans have come to love, courtesy of characters with names like Oderus Urungus, Balsac the Jaws of Death and Jizmak the Gusher.

Tonight at 6:30 p.m., see GWAR's latest stage show when the band headlines the Great Saltair, with Kingdom of Sorrow and Toxic Holocaust opening.

Of Montreal might be just as theatrical as GWAR, but the band's music comes from a completely different place. Instead of metal-tinged tales of alien warfare and bondage, Of Montreal deals in human emotions, aurally illustrated by a wicked meld of psychedelia, chamber-pop, power-pop and, on the band's latest, Prince-homaging funk and soul.

Led by band mastermind Kevin Barnes, Of Montreal has gone through many travails in its career. Besides a constantly evolving lineup, Barnes has bounced from Athens to Florida to Minnesota during the band's lifetime, and a stint living in Norway with his wife and newborn baby drove him into a deep depression. The new album, Skeletal Lamping, sounds a lot happier than Barnes' work has in a spell. And I just read that he took the stage at a recent New York show on horseback.

No word on whether there will be any livestock on hand when Of Montreal headlines tonight at the Murray Theater at 7:30.