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 All Dreamable Hideousness
concert review by Jill Kushman
A swirling storm of sword-fighting teen girls heralded the start of the Blaq Mummy Halloween show at Vagon on October 28, 2006. The girls unsheathed their steel to wage a savage clash for the approval of the marvelously black vinyl-clad “teen queen,” who seemed either to grant or deny her love at the end when she held aloft a crimson hanky. To the sides of her throne, shaggy boy cops threatened to massacre everyone with their AK-47s. The girls were hot, the cleavages deep, the metal cold, the boys hairy, the tension suddenly trip-wire. There was little doubt that the female-on-female combat had succeeded in getting many moist tongues hanging a bit longer in anticipation of the Mummy.
The band appeared relaxed and refreshed, as if they had just returned from hacking up and devouring the members of the Cal State Northridge men’s volleyball team. Famished members of the Mummy tribe bounced and flopped frenziedly against the stage front as the slaughter began to unfold. The sound was gigantic, the menace frothing over, the thrill improper. Reverend Feedback appeared bloodshot yet well-nuanced, unrushed and in full control as he propelled the Mummy to new earth-splitting peaks of putresence. Monstrous videos rolled on the screen behind: godzilla mauling the planet, attacks by spaceships and other loathesome vermin, good strong Americans abandoning their stations in wet-pantsed fright. It was the biggest, most bombastic, fleshiest and yummiest Mummy yet – a far cry from the beloved but minimalist three-piece scrapers that so memorably dominated the herna-bar circuit in recent years past.
Suddenly sashaying into the frame was Curtis, the original shadow of black death himself. “I thought he was dead,” I heard somebody mumble. He may have been dead, perhaps still alive – perhaps merely unholy. I flashbacked to the words Curtis had whispered into my ear back in 1992, at the dearly departed Bunkr Café, when the drunk Prague afternoons could seem to last for years – “Oh, what a beautiful long white neck you have. . . .”
Pretty soon, Reverend Feedback vomited up an eyeball, blood came came gushing down the front of his surgery fatigues. Somebody in a cow costume milked their teat, a bellydancer twisted in perversion, intense bearded fellows looked around nervously and sweated with ignobility. The nightmare was frightful beyond conception, the nuclei of all dreamable hideousness. Ten Stars.
- Jill Kushman
     
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