the creepy creeps
If our days are truly numbered, The Creepy Creeps are ready.
They showed up dressed as shape shifting lizards of the apocalypse, and openers The Bassics broke the tilt of the world’s axis, while Jello Biafra became a sphinx with a void of rare and tantalizing vinyl.
Sold out Soda Bar shows are intensely cozy, and even more so when you’re four Turf Club cocktails deep having only eaten half a dozen oysters shucked with a butter knife in your kitchen. While it could have been the lack of food induced state of delirium, the uncanny crowd was definitely something to note. There was an elderly gentlemen with a handle bar moustache, jail house tattoos, and wearing a tropical Hawaiian t-shirt, next to a boyish young man dressed to the nines with peach fuzz and a fedora hat.
First off, The Bassics: these boys can play. Watching them produces a certain type of jealously – they dominate the stage for such a young band and are most certainly in sync with Mod groups like The Who and The Faces. It’s in this genre that these boys butter their bread with solid foundations of musicianship, songwriting, and raw talent. Curiosity peaked in brief segments of their music which construct a style all their own. It’s within these segments they are the most exciting and unique. Whatever these gents do, there’s most certainly a very bright future for them as they’re exceptionally talented and moving in the right direction.
NASA shape shifting lizards, jungle go-go dancers, and Lucha Libre bouncers could only be the macabre performance of The Creepy Creeps. Made up some of San Diego’s greatest pioneers in music from bands such as The Locust, Struggle, and Tarantula Hawk, The Creepy Creeps draw from a vast array of musical influences. Their Dick Dale exotica, psycho, tiki, garage punk alchemy is intoxicating to the audience and can draw a hysterical trapeze artist party girl out of a passive, arms crossed, shoe gazer. Their antics definitely are rooted in a punk attitude, and their music is so energetically sharp and in your face, interlaced with snippets of dark humor or sarcastic banter in between songs. They’re a staple in San Diego and their implementation of guerilla tactics and musical conspiracies have yet to fail in swaying their audience and taking over venues.
Jello Biafra, legendary singer of the Dead Kennedys, is a musical mole that digs through cavernous crates of vinyl to bring some of the most unique sounds to our ears. He did a what great DJ does, first playing something familiar, then drawing us in with something not too esoteric; he then began running a single finger around our bodies until he eventually jabbed us and left us with “the who the F***k is this?” question of the night – the right ending to the right show.