Just announced: the band behind this unbelievably hilarious video, Russia’s ANJ, is playing at Jaxx on October 27.

Go on, watch the video. I’ll wait.

Let’s ignore the uncomfortably blatant sexism here for a second. Any video featuring a muscle-bound, gladiatorial Mikhail Gorbachev killing evil Stalin zombies by shooting lasers out of his eyes, thus ushering in a new era of Twinkie-eating capitalist prosperity, must be good. OK, so the music is pretty bad, but that’s splitting hairs.

It gets better: ANJ is opening for none other than Yngwie Malmsteen. I can’t go to this show, if only because my head would probably explode at the terrible awesomeness (awesome terribleness?) of it all.

As promised, from the show last Sunday evening. These three sure put on a visually appealing show, and here’s the evidence. Some samples below.

Amorphis (melodic folk metal from Finland):

Samael (industrial/electronic metal from Switzerland):

Virgin Black (goth/doom/classical metal from Australia):

The Green Evening Requiem (opening; black-ish metal from Philly):

And you’ve seen the ones of Dark Dissolve, the first opening band.

A frequent knock on Jaxx, the metal-oriented club out in Springfield, is that it never seems to book shows with fewer than five bands. If there’s a big headliner in town, Jaxx will invariably stick four local bands onto the bill to warm things up. It’s a great gesture for local musicians, but the concertgoer interested in an efficient in-and-out experience is likely to be frustrated.

Sometimes, though, there are pleasant surprises. Last night, a diverse lineup of metal bands—Amorphis from Finland, Samael from Switzerland, and Virgin Black from Australia—hit Jaxx, and sure enough, there were a couple openers. For one of them, D.C.’s Dark Dissolve, it was their first public performance ever, which is pretty neat. Also pretty neat is that they had a harp onstage. Also pretty neat is that they put on a good show. No one would have guessed they’d never played live in public before until the singer said so towards the end of their set. (Three of the members did play together in The Groaning.)

Dark Dissolve played a melodic, straightforward brand of gothic rock—I only caught three songs or so of their set (but then they were the first group on the bill so that may have been most of it), but I enjoyed what I heard; their violinist stood out a bit as the one who seemed to hold the songs together and give them a unique twist. My only complaint was that I couldn’t really hear the harp—something tells me the sound guys at Jaxx might not be used to working a harp into the mix. Looking forward to hearing what these folks come up with in time.

I’ll be posting a few photos from all five bands that played last night soon.

The pairing of venerable Scottish post-rockers Mogwai with Fuck Buttons, a knob-twiddling duo who weave subtle melodies through waves of tribal noise, is inspiring. Both groups make mostly instrumental soundscapes, but go about it in entirely different ways. Mogwai (pictured above) use traditional rock instruments; Fuck Buttons use Nintendo GameBoys, toy microphones, laptops, and whatever else seems to strike their fancy. Both of them were awesome last night at the 9:30 Club.

Fuck Buttons opened, and while two dudes fiddling with toys on a table onstage isn’t the most visually interesting thing ever, their music was absolutely enveloping. I recognized a bunch of stuff off of their full-length, Street Horrrsing, but it was tough to make out individual pieces as every song ran into the next, creating an uninterrupted, gloriously noisy performance. The music was repetitive, but always with some element of sonic interest: the occasional yawping vocals, live drumming, gorgeous melody, or weird sound coming from an unidentifiable source served to ensure that the music never got boring.

By the time Fuck Buttons finished their set, the club was packed, a marked difference from the lackluster audience that greeted Mogwai at their last show here back in 2006. Mogwai came on at precisely 9:30 p.m., opening with the first song from their first full-length, “Yes! I Am a Long Way From Home.” From there, their set meandered through pieces old and new, but mostly stuck to the quieter, lower-key compositions for which the band have become known. Mogwai has certainly mellowed with age, and fans can (and do) debate whether or not that’s a good thing, but it’s beyond dispute that they now do the “quiet and pretty” thing very, very well.

But last night they also proved that they can still rock. The set closed with the staple “Like Herod”—the song singlehandedly responsible for getting a decade of critics to lazily refer to Mogwai as “that soft-loud-soft band” - which then merged seamlessly into “Batcat,” the token loud rock song from Mogwai’s forthcoming new album, The Hawk is Howling (which you can hear in full on their MySpace page). It was an explosive ending that left the crowd cheering for more. More, of course, is what we got, and it came in the form of an encore that consisted of two more deliriously satisfying loud numbers—”Christmas Steps” and, of course, the noisy closer “My Father My King.” It’s as if the band structured their setlist to lull casual fans to sleep before blowing their eardrums out.

It’s worth noting that the sound mix was among the best I’ve ever heard at the 9:30 Club; each of Mogwai’s five instrumentalists stood out perfectly, even when picking a quiet guitar line amidst a sea of howling feedback. A good mix is pretty essential to music like this, which thrives on subtleties buried underneath walls of sound.

As usual, there are more photos here at Flickr.

In my show preview I said these two bands were musically way over the top. Turns out, they’re visually way over the top too: Sigh featured an extremely energetic frontwoman on sax and vocals, and while she naturally drew the bulk of attention (her choice of wardrobe was likely a factor here), bandleader Mirai Kawashima, pictured above, was one of the more animated keyboardists I’ve ever seen. Before them, Unexpect left the entire stage in front of the drum riser wide open—pedals, mic stands, etc all shoved to the side—to give them room to dance, headbang, and generally jump around spastically with massive amounts of hair flying everywhere.

Musically, Sigh were fun, although much more guitar-oriented than they are on record—though that might have just been because the keyboard and sax were mixed way too low. Unexpect’s live show seems to be getting better all the time, which makes sense since they never seem to stop touring. The two opening bands were both pretty solid. All in all a good night for a metalhead; shame the club wasn’t anywhere near packed (it was actually the emptiest I’ve ever seen Jaxx, which usually seems to get good attendance).

Tons more photos are here at Flickr, but here are some highlights from Sigh:

And a few from Unexpect:

If you’re in the mood for some absurd circus metal, tonight’s your night to head out to the ‘burbs. Two of the most ridiculously over-the-top experimental metal acts you’ll ever hear are headlining a night at Jaxx in Springfield. Japan’s Sigh and Quebec’s Unexpect (pictured) play the kind of symphonic metal that you can’t help but laugh at, at least at first, because it’s just so bombastic and (some might say) pretentious.

But criticizing either of these groups for being too bombastic is kind of like criticizing Britney Spears for being too pop. It might be a meaningful statement of opinion, but as any kind of objective description or evaluation it just misses the point. These bands revel in their shamelessness and take bombast to the level of art form. If there was ever anything deserving of the slightly horrifying label “prog metal,” these guys are it.

If that sounds awful, consider this: I’ve seen Unexpect play Jaxx twice already this year, and each time I saw them I came away a bigger fan. After spending enough time with their records to actually figure out what’s going on in their insanely twisty compositions, a certain naive charm emerges. You have to admire bands like these who are completely unafraid to throw it all out on the table at once - hitting the listener with obvious jazz, rock, metal and classical influences one after the other.

Additionally, Sigh are kind of a historically significant band, as the only non-Scandinavian group that was signed by the infamous and short-lived Øystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous) to his infamous and short-lived Deathlike Silence Productions label. If that’s not black metal cred, nothing is.

On Sunday, Comet Ping-Pong (otherwise known as Ground Zero of everyone’s favorite northwest D.C. culture wars) plays host to a pair of bands that have recently been profiled here and in the print edition: Extra Life, whom I wrote about a couple months ago, and Tussle, whose latest record is reviewed in this weeks’ print edition.

So I suppose we’d be remiss not to mention that show in this space; but more than that, there’s no way I’m missing Extra Life in the flesh. Fans of tuneful, accessible avant-rock, you know who you are… if you haven’t gotten your fill at 611 Florida on Saturday, come up to Comet on Sunday.

I’ve never seen live music at Comet before–rumor has it the show should start around 8pm, but I’d take that with a grain of salt. There’s also a closing DJ set after Extra Life and Tussle are done, courtesy of Will Eastman.

Two years ago, I had the privilege of seeing Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii perform a mesmerizing set in the basement of George Washington University’s Phillips Hall. That show was one of the most exhilarating concerts I saw all year. I had a similar feeling last night, once again in room B120 in Phillips Hall, watching Baltimore-based pianist Nobu Stowe play an improvised set with two D.C. musicians, Daniel Barbiero on double bass and Ted Zook on electric bass-cello. This comparison doesn’t really go anywhere—Stowe’s melodicism and improvisational style is completely different from Fujii’s, and he prefers to fill spaces that Fujii would leave empty—except for the fact that I had a certain feeling of watching brilliance at work.

These three musicians had never played together before, which was fairly evident in the first piece, as Stowe spent the entire piece watching the other two performers and giving the occasional visual cue. Even after this initial feeling out, Barbiero and Zook were happy to merely accompany Stowe on his dense melodic excursions for most of the concert. The second and third pieces the trio played almost could have been Stowe solo pieces—his sense of melody shone through brilliantly, as he found compelling tunes off of which to base exploratory improvisations. A percussive duet with Barbiero did lead off the third piece, but soon enough Stowe was in his own world again, playing over the other two musicians—dominant, but not aggressively so.

A fourth, more fragmented piece allowed Barbiero and Zook some room to maneuver, but to my ears this came at the cost of Stowe’s lyrical sense of melody. The fifth and final piece was in a similar vein but came off better, with Stowe providing a bouncy accompaniment to Barbiero and Zook’s swirling arcos. All in all, while it was fairly clear that these three musicians had never played together before, the result was deeply satisfying thanks to Stowe’s impressive abilities at what he calls “total improvisation”—a concept he derives from Keith Jarrett and describes thusly: “definite melodies/harmonic/rhythm structures all spontaneously ‘composed’… as opposed to ’sound-exploration’ à la free-improv.”

A rapt audience of about 25 seemed a pretty good showing—actually one of the bigger crowds I’ve been part of in this performance space—but Stowe’s accessible style should hardly preclude him from eventually playing to much, much larger audiences.

While you’re indulging in the D.C. tradition of weather-related paranoia and stocking up on food, water and batteries, maybe you should considering grabbing some earplugs as well. On Saturday, Dub Trio, a heavy-hitting group on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label who mix chunky metal riffs with chilled-out dub, hit DC9. While these guys still have a ways to go before perfecting their formula, at the very least it’s a fascinating one, and as of now at least a seriously hard-rocking one. Hop over to their MySpace page for a listen.

Sunday, what better place to weather a storm (though I suppose it’ll be gone by then) than hanging out in the basement of an imposing university building? The monthly experimental madness that is Electric Possible is on this weekend at its usual location of room B120 in the basement of GW’s Phillips Hall (22nd & H Streets). This time around, the Nobu Stowe Duo (piano/drums), augmented by locals on cello and bass, get top billing. Stowe’s latest album was recorded at, and named after, Baltimore’s An Die Musik performance space, and is a thoughtful, restrained brand of free improvisation that mostly eschews the skronk and cacophony of most collective improv. Stowe’s own comparisons invoke more Keith Jarrett than, say, Cecil Taylor.

Obviously, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails weren’t the first bands to give away their music for free on the Internet. Some savvy Googling will reveal blogs dedicated to finding bands and labels that give away music for free. In any case, if you’re into out-there jazz, here are a few, um, free free jazz downloads that are well worth your $0:

Bob Ostertag, who’s worked extensively with the likes of John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith and so on, has long offered his out-of-print recordings for free download from his Web site. He’s now up to 15 albums downloadable for free. One is the hilarious and atypical Fear No Love, which is kind of a send-up of cheesy ’80s funk, but performed by legendary free improvisers and prominently featuring LGBTQ-empowering lyrics. A more “standard” free-jazz effort of note is the Say No More series, a bunch of fragmented improvs spliced together into chaotic wholes.

Speaking of funk, most of Steve Coleman’s incredibly groovy experimental jazz works are also available for free download from the man himself. The Tao of Mad Phat and Def Trance Beat are a couple good starting points. Like Ostertag, Coleman has written extensively about why he gives away his music for free—long before the likes of Radiohead started doing so.

Insubordinations calls itself “a netlabel for improvised music,” and has 27 full-length releases all available for free download under Creative Commons licenses. I haven’t actually explored most of this stuff, but one that I’ve dug lately is PHAT’s La Grande Peste, which is sort of like jazz filtered through doom metal. Sister label eDogm has 20 more releases across a wider spectrum that includes electroacoustic improvisation, ambient and drone.

Finally, bassist (and D.C. native) Reuben Radding went through a project last year he called 12 in 2007, in which he released a free recording every month in 2007. These all feature Radding with various collaborators, fully improvised; there’s a ton of material to wade through but it all has a pretty solid baseline of quality, as long as you like free improv (much of this is not “jazz” per se, at least in any sense that traditionalists would agree with).

I’m still working my way through much of this stuff, but if anyone has anything to add, I’m all ears.