PLAYGROUND BOSTON

The three extraterrestrials that call themselves Planetoid were in an unusual position last Wednesday at Harper’s Ferry. Ordinarily, the talk from these sharp-dressed spacemen is all about waging intergalactic war, melting faces and enslaving the “fleshbags” that remain. But on this night, the Planetoid showed an unexpected flash of mercy and chose to save the day for the earthlings they had come to destroy.

Perhaps they took pity on us. After all, much of the crowd at Harper’s Ferry was hoping to see grammy-nominated, 247-piece puppet-core goofballs Green Jelly (pronounced “Green Jello”) along with openers Hydrahead, Neurological Damage. However, word began to trickle through the Allston grapevine earlier that day that Green Jelly had fallen prey to a sudden financial disaster when founding member Moronic Dictator’s assets were frozen by his bank. Monsieur Dictator and his mates could not scare up enough last-minute cash to get out of California, and had to cancel the scheduled tour behind their latest release, Musick To Insult Your Intelligence By. Of course, the crowd would not have gotten to see Green Jelly anyway, given that Planetoid would have already reduced them to a steaming mess of slime and bone fragments long before the headliners hit the stage – but the point is, they (the crowd) didn’t know that, and fully expected to be regaled with Green Jelly’s obscene retellings of “the Three Little Pigs” and other childhood favorites.

It could have been a major disappointment, but by the time Planetoid packed up their alien weapons and returned to their mother ship, no one in Harper’s Ferry could be heard asking “where the hell is Green Jelly?”

Gimmicks and rock n’ roll have a curious relationship. Many fans that claim to have a good idea about music will turn up their noses at the very scent of one. “It’s cheap,” they’ll say about a band like Kiss or Gwar or Green Jelly. “If a band has great songs, they shouldn’t need a gimmick.” And yet, especially in a place like Boston, where you can go to a different show every night for a year and never see the same band twice, having great songs isn’t necessarily enough to get folks to pay to see a band they already saw once. Take Planetoid, for example: any band that injects a dose of deep space horror into the key compounds early 70’s is a band that I want to see. Again and again. Of course, not everyone thinks that pre-Reaper Blue Oyster Cult is the end-all, be-all of musical existence. But you don’t have to share my throwback dinosaur rock sensibilities to remember how wild a concert was if the band took the extra steps to create an atmosphere unlike any other show.

Even before the opening power chords were fired, this objective was accomplished by Planetoid. All they had to do was stand there: Locrius with blue paint on his face and hands, staring daggers at the crowd through Mars-red eyes; Ovatus, green as the creatures in Naked Lunch with a Ceratosaurus horn poking out of his forehead; and Admiral Time, hulking over the drum kit in his and chrome space helmet. Throw in a couple of pink-haired go-go dancers, a pair of hula dancers in fishnets and the fact that the only thing on TV was the Yankees celebrating a World Series victory and you can understand why no one at Harper’s Ferry wanted to look anywhere but at the stage.

The Planetoid sound is as thoroughly coagulated as their visual formula. Like Black Sabbath, the speeds change, but the slaughter never stops. They lay it on slow and thick with songs like Black Miasma and Lord of this Asteroid, and then pour in the liquid schwartz for the galloping stampede of Russian Space Solution and the whip-cracking front end of Chain Reaction (a space-age re-imagining of Speed King by Deep Purple). The proud overuse of synchronized bends injects a real 70’s muscle car swagger in most of their riffs. In fact, just about every song has at least one moment that struts out the brash and bluesy curvature of Edgar Winter Group’s Frankenstein (which is funny, because I’m always saying how every song by every artist should have at least one moment that sounds like Edgar Winter Group’s Frankenstein. I TOLD you it would work, damnit!). Beyond their 31st Century heaviness, the things that keep the Planetoid virus vaccine-resistant are Locrius’s demonic snarl (too raw and throaty to appear on a Sabbath or Purple record) and the way he and Ovatus utilize their favorite effects at the most opportune moments (chief example: the high-octave harmonizer that produces the sonic equivalent of that phallic little mini-mouth popping out of the queen’s jaws in the Alien movies). All of these transmutations were in full effect as Planetoid rocked the Earth’s foundation for a solid light year. They swept it clean with fire in a front-to-back hurdle through their album, Shadow of the Planetoid, and then terraformed what was left with two encores (maybe three, maybe more. I don’t know. My face was melted).

Of course, every mass destruction needs a harbinger. And for Planetoid, that role was filled admirably by Neurological Damage (and, from what I could gather, Hydronaut, but they were already well into their last song by the time I arrived at the show – sorry ‘bout that, fellas). In returning to our little chat about gimmicks, ND doesn’t go as far as Planetoid in this regard, but what they lack in face paint and bright white suits, they more than make up for in showmanship – and show-off-manship! Simply put, the three dudes in Neurological Damage can flat-out shred, and they want everyone to know about it. They will tell you this to your face, and they will show you on the stage. Rusty McStix loves to go from zero to sixty and back to zero, and then back to sixty, and back to zero (and so on) all within a double-bass pummeling that lasts, maybe, three seconds (let’s see a Ferrari Enzo do that!). Billy D. Williams (or “the White Lando,” as I like to call him) plays his tap-happy guitar solos with his teeth, behind his head and – one of these days – with his toes. And with a bass in his hands, Capt. Dusty produces a sound that falls somewhere between a tommy gun hosedown and the revving of a Harley Davidson.

The Harper’s Ferry show was a kind of experiment for ND, who played the entire set with Vic Foresta on vocals for the first time. Foresta, the full-time frontman for funk renegades the Force (which used to include Dusty on bass), has been a fixture at recent ND shows, but typically joins the band only for a few songs per set. On this night, however, ND fans got a full dose of Foresta’s zany little-kid-who-just-drank-a-litre-of-Jolt-cola energy (and his equally hyperactive hairdo). Now, I’ll admit, I always had a certain fondness for Dusty and Billy’s guttural trade-off act on vocals (especially on the infectious anti-love letter, Space Kitty, and the band’s eponymously titled funk metal anthem), but having Vic in there for a whole set certainly frees up the Cap’n and White Lando to focus, exclusively, on doing what they do best. His persona is an ideal match for Neurological Damage, which takes the oddball precision of Primus and serves it up with the bong shop irreverence of Faith No More and the cowboy cockiness of Van Halen.