You see them everywhere; on the covers of magazine, thrashing about in music videos, rolling off the assembly line with their perfectly messy hair via Queer Eye endorsed product, maybe one is completely shaven, ones a screamer while another croons for the ladies. The era of cute boy bands has transformed into a false sense of mojo sponsored by The Buckle, leaving many yearning for the real sex, drugs and rock and roll we came to know and love oh, so many years ago.
Thankfully there are also those musicians who make it easy to keep the question, “Say it ain’t so Joe!” tucked nicely on the shelf collecting dust. Denver based band The Omens offer up the grit, grime and gregarious celebration of punk, blues and an era of surf that didn’t play out on the Beach Blanket Babylon set, unless you ordered up the X Rated version, Beach Bondage Babylon.
Transforming from the Down-n-Outs into The Omens, lead singer and guitarist Michael Daboll has clocks in years of debauchery, and is now equipped with Forrest Bartosh (formally of The Gamits and The Swayback) on drums, Matt Hunt on bass and Greg Dahl, who’s organ, blues harp and maracas provide the lubricant to the band’s carnal fervor.
According to their website, www.the-omens.com, the boys are big fans of caffeine, which we like to hear. But you can go in cold stone sober into this deal and still feel like you must have swallowed, snorted or drank some kind of substance without your knowledge, because you can’t keep from flailing around in state of uncontrolled lunacy.
Although The Omens have kept themselves busy playing about and spreading the mayhem, including gigs in Texas and at SXSW in Austin this past year, Destroy The ESP debuts as the band’s first release on Hipsville International Records. With enough hormones to wake the dead, Destroy starts off strong with the first track, “I Lost My Mind,” and doesn’t let go until the last chord flies on “You’re a Dirty Liar.”
The instrumental “John Fante” goes from a strip tease saunter to a full-out, throw down orgy. A fragment of the chorus from “Make Time” actually sounds a tad like Eric Halborg from The Swayback. But where The Omens’ real kindred spirits lie is with the psyche beat, rock and blues bands that filled the dark and dirty clubs in the ’60s. That kind of passion screams on “Heart Full of Lies,” where Daboll gives his lover a piece of his mind after he’s given her his heart, along with more than a few rounds of Jack.
The party goes down tonight at Larimer Lounge, along with a rock poster showing by the legendary artist Lindsey Kuhn, The Symptoms, Machine Gun Blues and Jim Yelnick. Things get started early at 5pm with a free keg of beer, so if you want to start your weekend off right, you best be there on time ‘cause I can’t imagine that beer will last very long.
