ENDERS OF OZONE, XXX AUDIO
PEnders of Ozone have at least one thing in common with Marty McFly’s Pinheads: I’m afraid they’re just too darn loud. The Bellingham-based melodic hardcore quartet tried to rock Belltown’s Uptown Espresso last May, but thanks to the prickly ears in all those delightful $1,000/mo. studios nearby, the plug was pulled after but a single power chord. Thank God the Comet is a Dave Matthews-free zone. Enders are an amalgam of all sorts of good rambunctious noise: Guitarist Chris Meyer’s deadpan howl is culled from the Trail of Dead, his bleak intrapersonal rants are torn from Maynard James Keenan’s black journals, and the guitars converge and separate Like Jehu. Comet Tavern. $5. 9 p.m. Sat., Aug. 2. ANDREW BONAZELLI
STEELY DAN
Everything Must Go
(MCA)
Steely Dan thrived as a touring act in the ’90s, but 2000’s uneven Two Against Nature proved that “writing together” and merely “playing” are very different beasts. The recondite synchronicity that invented Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s best ’70s work went missing on 2vN; it was overeager and underfocused, a trial run that should have stayed in the can. Everything Must Go indicates the beginning of the real recording reunion. It’s the logical retroactive follow-up to Aja‘s unrelenting expressionist strokes (with Gaucho‘s foul ammonia peep-show-floor bouquet next in the sequence). Except for the odd reference to “digital video” or a character going “postal,” EMG is 1978 suspended in cryonics, down to the igneous Hugh McCracken guitar solos, the fuzak backup girlssubdued studio wallpaper, omnipresent but barely thereand Fagen’s (accidental?) name check of a New York City subway line that hasn’t existed since 1988. The themes haven’t changed, either. “The Last Mall” seems similar to Talking Heads’ world-without-commerce satire “(Nothing But) Flowers,” until close inspection fast reveals a Judgment Day allegory shrouded in salvation gospel, a sort of anti-“Black Friday.” “Lunch With Gina” is “forever,” and “Gina” is drugs. “Pixeleen” and “Green Book” push a long-standing Lolita-fixation from creepy/naughty into unfathomably uncomfortable romantic, while the “Rajahs of Erase” populating the narrative in “GodWhacker” “rip and chop and slice” through the dodgy late-night street grids of Fagen and Becker’s yummiest fantasies. And the title track’s punch line is “I move to dissolve the corporation in a pool of margaritas.” Times are tough, but if you can afford a bottle of Cuervo Gold, raise it to that. Steely Dan play Gorge Amphitheater, 754 Silica Road N.W., George, 206-628-0888, at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 2. $43.05-$79.80 adv. JODY BETH ROSEN
