When you write about music in Seattle, Chris Martin is one of the best dudes to run into at shows. With his arms crossed and beer-in-hand, Martin will happily lean over and tell you everything he knows about whatever band happens to be onstage at the time, what new band in town is worth checking out, and what records he purchased recently. But his uber-music fan tangents often deflect attention away from his own great band, Kinski. An instrumental four-piece, Kinski’s mission is to marry pop and hard-rock, and emotion and experimentalism, but forever divorce repetition from boredom. One of the few bands that could play a riff over and over, Kinski deliver with that 70s hard-rock thrust, but allow it all to breathe by opening their songs up to psychedelic explorations. As they pummel their Sabbath-esque riffs with a machine-like intensity, the natural audience reaction is to bob heads and curl lips into extreme guitar-face. But when you least expect it, Martin & Co. switch gears on you by diffusing the air with hazy space-ambience.

Mon., April 6, 9 p.m., 2009