Dry-humpingly good

Stay home Thursday night, and you might miss something. Consider this recent Thursday at the Blue Lamp: The opening act, Rachel Lomax, warbled throaty versions of her own songs and accompanied her big voice by playing electric piano. “I saw her playing in a bar in Placerville,” said local singer-songwriter-poet Ruebi Freyja, “and so I invited her to sing here tonight.” The venue may not have been ideal for Lomax, but people seemed to dig her. It wasn’t hard to imagine the blonde singer holing up in a cabin with a stack of Barbra Streisand records, plotting to reinvent cabaret music with a vivid Hangtown twist.

Freyja’s set followed. Freyja has stripped down her songs to bare essentials; her rudimentary acoustic guitar figures, which sounded like something you might find on one of the 1927 recordings collected on the Smithsonian Folkways set Anthology of American Folk Music, provided a scaffold over which she draped bell-like vocal lines that hung briefly in the air before vaporizing. A cellist, Eric Talley, added sonic color. There’s something terribly sensual about Freyja’s songs—one young couple, inspired perhaps, dry-humped on a barstool, while two women made out in a dark corner.

Next up was Nothing People, a trio from Orland that cleared the yin energy from the room, along with most of Freyja’s female fans, in short order. “You’re gonna like ’em,” Dan Quillan, better known as Art Lessing, had predicted. No kidding. The band wielded cheap guitars like truncheons, sending bitterly howling and snarling guitar lines whirling around the room like agitated vampire bats. As Anton Barbeau put it: “Jeez, that’s the best guitar sound I’ve ever heard!” Joey D, the Frantic Records proprietor who reissued the lost Public Nuisance sides and the Ikon Records ’60s singles compilation, was similarly moved. “You guys sound like a cross between Hawkwind and the Cramps!” he shouted.

The band—its MySpace page lists the members as Ør, Ød and Øs—switched instruments throughout the set. The woman who’d begun on bass switched to drums, then a synth with a rhythm box, and the original drummer picked up a guitar while the first guitarist switched to bass. Got that? Nothing People is the best wickedly psychedelic band this scribe’s seen in a long time, and here’s hoping it returns soon.

Quillan took the stage next, joined by percussionist Larry Rodriguez, who goes by the name Flower Vato. As Art Lessing, Quillan has released a number of homemade experimental-music albums on CD, and the duo’s performance Thursday brought that spirit to the stage. The sound coming out of Quillan’s guitar was run through various effects and, with Rodriguez’s timekeeping, often took on a cinematic incidental-music vibe. The effect was like hearing John Lurie, Captain Beefheart and Hugo Montenegro tossed into a blender with several large jungle animals having angry, noisy sex, which would then morph into a demolition derby staged with backhoes and bulldozers.

The only way to close out an evening like that was a drive-thru chorizo burrito from Beto’s, followed by an argument with my dog over who was getting the last bite. The dog won.