Portugal. The Man

Portugal. The Man. As if this Alaska-via-Oregon band’s moniker weren’t confusing enough, consider the mind scramble of their music: metal, prog, thrash, gospel, soul, and off-kilter Zappa-esque skronk topped with high-pitched vocals (and sometimes lefty politics) from singer/guitarist John Gourley. At the Middle East upstairs last Sunday, he directed his attention stage left, never looking the audience in the eye. He and his band — officially a trio, but a septet on tour — were just buried in the oddball groove of it all, not unlike the Brian Jonestown Massacre, another West Coast band who once employed a tambourine player on stage. (Kirk Ohnstad filled that role with P.TM.)

During the hour-long set there was constant juxtaposition of the light and the dark, the soft and the loud. Their latest CD, Church Mouth, is a prog-rock monster packed with tricky chord changes and stylistic shifts. It’s also full of esoteric imagery. They played four songs from it Sunday, and the vocals kept getting tangled up in the mix. Gourley sang in a high, sometimes falsetto, voice, but you rarely knew what he was going on about. (Check the lyric packet on the CD cover and learn more: war sucks, numbness is our human condition.)

After the set, I asked bassist/singer Zach Carothers about the band’s ethos and their stylistic mishmash: “We cop out and just say rock and roll. We listen to a lot of soul, Creedence, Bill Withers . . . ” Yep, Portugal. The Man, like Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers (and a myriad of post-punk bands), try to jam sweetness, soul, and spice into a smart, palatable, edgy package — with mixed results. They were half-enticing, half-irritating. It wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t dull. Despite the controlled frenzy and implicit passion, it just didn’t resonate as intended.