On Monday night the weather changed so harshly and dramatically, it would take only the best show to bring folks out of their cozy homes and into the elements. But recordBar’s impressive lineup had music lovers damn near sprinting to the venue to watch Peelander-Z, Stiff Middle Fingers, and Coitus.
If you’re a filthy fellow, you will absolutely love Coitus. The Kansas City band is full of theatrics and sexual innuendo.
They began the set with the Andrew W.K.-esque frontman off the stage, conducting the opening song with an actual baton. He then leapt onstage and burst his Axl-Rose-like vocals into the air, powered by sweet metal guitar riffs and a fierce violin behind him. “We’ve come to get you warmed up!” he announced. “We’re like the fluffers of this show!”
Make no mistake, Coitus lives up to their dirty little name. They were exploding with sexual references, and you can find those nasty little numbers all over their just recently-released CD.
If the cold weather took it out of you, Stiff Middle Fingers put it right back in. Just as a heavy crowd was starting to stream into recordBar, the Lawrence punk rockers shook the place up with their endless energy.
The powerhouse band plowed through several short numbers, and frontman Travis Arey didn’t disappoint with his antics. He climbed anything within sight, sweat all over the crowd, and even gathered up his mic cable and sprinted outside to perform part of a song from the patio.
By the time Peelander-Z took the stage, the place was brimming with excitable fans. Some of them were even jittering. Most of them donned their most ridiculous outfits (a ritual at Peelander-Z shows), and those who dressed in costume were pulled onto the stage to help get the crowd warmed up.
The recordBar eventually became a bottomless pit of crowd surfing. The band crowd surfed. The fans crowd surfed. Even some bystanders who didn’t want to crowd surf were forced to perform the act. If you dressed up, you got pulled onstage. If you were awkward and didn’t look very comfortable, you got pulled onstage. No one was safe from the trickery Peelander-Z brought along with them, but all were more than happy with the end result.
The highly interactive show brought fans together to limbo, play instruments, dance, skip rope, and more. Peelander-Z’s overactive members are not strangers to this area, and they gave mad props to Middle of the Map Fest after playing a successful show there just a few months ago.
This type of show isn’t for the faint of heart, but it will make you more confident than when you came in. Before the show, folks from every part of the scene sauntered in and stuck to their groups. But during those brief two hours of vibrant activity, they were performing the same ridiculous tasks together as one (no matter which clique they belonged to). It’s a fantastic gesture of goodwill in Kansas City, and only a band as absurd as Peelander-Z is capable of pulling it off.
Words and photos by Fally Afani
