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Live Reviews

Out: Walter Sickert and friends invade Brighton Music Hall

GRAND GUIGNOL Friday's Brighton Music Hall show featured a diverse array of intergalactic characters.

This was before Walter Sickert and his dread pirate crew of Broken Toys arrived, in their ongoing quest to turn reality inside out. Throughout the evening, revelers masquerading as Westboro Baptists picketed with slogans like "God Hates Figs" and "Go Home Xenomorph." Because they do not enjoy being protested, Sickert and Co. entranced the fun police via the hypnotic power of dirgey apocalypse-folk. Psychically feeble as Jesus freaks tend to be, the demonstrators immediately tore most of their clothes off and commenced to boogie.

As for what the smoker couldn't figure out, it had something to do with an astral battle of wills between a scantily clad sorceress named Mary Widow and her unlikely twin brother, a blue-skinned intergalactic goblin warrior named Locrius, who also sings and plays the bass. Having cut out some poor bastard's still-beating heart in front of the piss-terrified capacity crowd, the blood-spattered Widow made no secret of her plans to murder everyone at BMH — especially Sickert. Originally, Locrius was all about the scheduled slaughter, until he remembered his interstellar transport vehicle requires human souls as fuel, and dead things don't have souls.

So, Locrius turned on his sinister sibling. Deploying his esoteric knowledge of Widow's weaknesses, he repeatedly shouted the two magic words he knew to be the Widow's kryptonite — "Helter" and "Skelter." In a counter-intuitive disregard for her own safety, Widow belted out the verses to the Beatles' classic with aplomb. Soon, both adversaries lay unconscious in a heap.

That, among other things, was what the guy smoking outside saw on Friday. Sickert's Toys, the cosmic rock of Locrius' Planetoid, the power poppin' Sidewalk Driver, Black Thai's immaculate prog-metal, and a cavalcade of burlesque hoofers staged one of the weirdest rock shows in memory.