The
Puscifer concert Friday night at
Brady Theater began with a faux documentary showcasing the band’s hilariously rednecky history. It featured frontman
Maynard James Keenan as
Billy D, a blonde, pompadoured, pompous prig.
The band’s histrionic history is filled with drunken lying, cheating, stealing, more stealing, cussin’, cheating, cheating and performing. And laughs.
The real Puscifer, the
live Puscifer, however, was pure honesty and unadulterated art.
The real-time, cowboy hat-topped Keenan followed, tugging a trailer behind him onto the stage. The audience screamed.
Out of the Airstream came the set and band member
Carina Round. Out came a trailer park replete with a hot grill fire, folding camp chairs, a screen with video clips fluttering behind them.
"Life is too short not to create something with every breath we draw," Keenan said, dressed in black.
"...Welcome to Puscifer."
Unlike
Tool or
A Perfect Circle, his other projects, obviously more commercially successful, Puscifer is far more viable as an emotive, quirky, fully-formed art piece.
Arizona was the band's backdrop. Keenan's cult of creativity populated the makeshift trailer park (and the venue), filled with mischief and tiny monsters, blinking at fans from the night around them. It was a gorgeously haunting escape into sanity. Yes, Technicolored sanity.
Keenan was the ringleader but never stole the show. What he calls his “solo” project seems anything but, especially live.
A Puscifer show is at once absurd and philosophical, minimalist and other-worldly. Traditional instruments – guitar, bass, drums, vocals and even banjo – blended with fuzzed-out distortion, electronics and keyboards. The setlist mixed metal elements with melodic harmonies and danceable beats.
In turns, band members took over picnic tables to play cards, sip wine, admire the Hibachi fire. Round briefly kicked off her mile-high heels. The casual facade never fully masked Keenan's and Round's unflinching intensity.
Friday's concert was human. Thought-provoking. Literal. Figurative. The screaming drunk next to me was beyond ecstasy. But you didn’t have to be anywhere near drunk to go there with him.
Opening act Carina Round's sultry siren voice was robust and passion-filled, her band (also Keenan's band) roiled darkly behind her.
A noir dream, she tangled Morrissey with metal, electronic hand-claps with punch-to-the-face percussion. Her vocal and lyrical prowess was diabolical in its sexiness -- Patti Smith locked in mortal combat with Bjork. Moderated by Tom Waits.
A male dominated crowd crowed her über-feminine curves and her captivating stage presence. She's what female vocalists aspire to be. But she pushes her competitor's faces into the dirt without soiling her own silk in the process.
Her debut solo album isn't yet out, but her single is, she said.
Go listen to her. Good God, go and do it
now.
Setlist: The Green Valley
Tiny Monsters
Vagina Mine
Dozo
Toma
The Rapture (Fear is a Mind Killa Mix)
The Weaver
Rev 22:20
Polar Bear
Indigo Children
Oceans
Monsoons
Horizons
Conditions of My Parole
Man Overboard
Telling Ghosts
The Undertaker
(encore) Tumbleweed
