Columbia City Theater’s trick-or-treat bowl runneth over tonight as the venue hosts the eighth annual Cabaret Macabre.
Most musical celebrations of Halloween lean towards goth and death metal, but The Cabaret spotlights outfits with a sense of style and showmanship that’s more Tom Waits than Rob Zombie. And like Waits, the bands on tonight’s bill know that tales of debauchery and oddball characters are as part and parcel of Halloween as conventional spooks, ghosts, and monsters.
Californians The Peculiar Pretzelmen parlay an odd and oddly wonderful amalgamation of traditional pre-rock pop and rattletrap insanity. Lead singer M Incroyable frequently barks his lyrics into a megaphone with the over-the-top, eye-rolling intensity of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and percussionist Deacon bashes away at everything from metal laundry tubs to washboards to (occasionally) the odd drum. The whole mix gallops along on spastic melodies carried by vintage guitars, banjos, and God knows what else, and they flat-out blew me away at the Columbia City Theater one-year anniversary show last summer.
Veteran steel guitar player Baby Gramps was born in Florida, but the Seattle-based musician’s eccentric, muttering delivery and raw guitar playing feel a world away from that sunny clime. If Tom Waits left the city to become a bearded hermit in the Appalacians, he’d sound something like this.
Any band with a lead singer who leans on a squeeze box and sings lyrics about (among other things) hard-luck cases viewing their lives through the bottom of a shotglass is all right by me; especially if the band’s as all-around wonderful as Seattle’s The Bad Things. With their top-flight musicianship and Jimmy the Pickpocket’s deceptively sweet voice at the center, the band always delivers live, leavening their brand of Pogues-style cry-in-your-pint sing-along ditties with a wry sense of humor and fun (I’m officially in love with their polka’ed-up cover of The Stones’ “Out of Time”). Make sure your liver’s ready for the alcohol onslaught, and get ready to dance.
