dirty monkey bugspray fun

Ah, the pheonix, an old theatre converted into a night-club. They should be the best kind, but they ain't. I have yet to have a really good experience at one... merely passables, like Orbital or Lovage.
Well, this night would start out much the same, with the opening band appearing on stage seemingly as roadies, then strangely jumping into "performance" without any sort of self-introduction. Nobody knew who they were. Were they Simian, the only other band to be featured on the ticket stub? or were they some other opening act.
Whatever. They played their garage-grunge 1994 Crow soundtrack music for four songs too many (I'm always willing to test three songs of a crappy act before I decide), not stopping for any audience interaction or even song-break chatter. They looked bored on stage, and the audience was as equally bored if not moreso.
Their final dose of ringing reverb drowned out the only words to the crowd, which my party and I were trying to decipher... did he say "thank you, we are simian" or "thank you, up next is simian." Seeing as none of us were familiar with Simian, we were hoping to cut to the chase, and hoping that they were and that Ladytron would be up next, and us old farts could get our tired asses out of there early. Unfortunately we were wrong.
Simian play in a hyper, no-boundaries manner, a post-funk-rock band that sounds like so many other bands you don't know where to start the comparisons: Happy Mondays, Prince, Jamiroquai, Blue Man Group, Super Furry Animals were all bandied about. But Jen hit the nail on the head when she said "Jesus Jones meets an amped up Speak-and-Spell" (and as cool as it may sound, that wasn't a compliment, people).
I don't know, staring at these guys bouncing around on stage with their thin cheeks and art Garfunkle hair, bass just kicking through my body, I just wasn't moved. I wondered if I just wasn't getting it, or if it was crap. I'm really leaning towards the latter, as really even the nice Blue-Man-Group rip-off failed to stir me.
Two hours after the start of the evening, the band we were really there to see hit the stage in their grey twill KGB-esque suits and their Kraftwerk posturing... keyboards and sequencers mossing the stage. The start of their set perpetuated the horrid evening, as the mics were so out of balance with the sound it wound up coming off like a German art-house cinema sountrack and overdub. Even "Playgirl" sounded awful, complete deadpan monotone... no harmony at all.
But the coldness of the set grew to merely sterile, with the 1984-esque projection not just behind and above them, but on them. As the sound levels began to get in step and vocalists Mira Aroyo and Helen Marnie began to feel more comfortable on stage, the show built upon itself, the songs growing more resinent and powerful, moving the robotic side-stepping of the crowd that much more.
Two encores capped off the show, which proved that sometimes style can be as engaging as the music itself.