by Will Bishop

This Saturday night, beneath a haloed Waxing Gibbous moon, the high ceilings of Kate Buchanan were filled with churning and rapturous sludge. Main act Frankie and the Witch Fingers, in tandem with opener Zookraught, metamorphosed the vast, generally bean bag adorned space into a downright disgusting melee of bodies and sonic warfare. No vast Orwellian projections of Kevin from The Office on the walls this time around. If you wanted to escape your roommates and sleep for an alarming amount of time in Cal Poly Humboldt’s unofficially-official chamber of nap-titude, you were gonna be better off trying your luck under that big lightbulb in the sky.

Launching the night in T-minus to dance-punk doomsday fashion was Zookraught, a trio from Seattle consisting of Stephanie Jones on bass, Sam Frederick on guitar and Baylee Harper on drums adorned with facepaint that invited the tantalizing question, “What if Kiss was good?” Well, if Kiss was good, and a completely different genre of music and not in any way remotely similar to Kiss with the exception of their facepaint, then perhaps they would be like Zookraught — and perhaps they would be face-meltingly sick as fuck. Like Zookraught. For the first minute or two, I wondered where exactly their vocals were even coming from before realizing this is one of those “OH MY GOD THE DRUMMER SINGS”-type bands, promptly followed by the realization that they in fact all sing, and they will throw around that vocal baton at breakneck speed.

Describing themselves after the show as “Team Fun,” the band conjures an aura of whimsicality, theatricality and ferocicality (sometimes bands deserve new words) in equal measure, crossing guitar necks like simulated ten-string intercouse and raging at the American political machine with all manner of electro-acoustical might. Nary an ass was left unshaken by the end of this blistering set, as the band perfectly navigated the precarious zone between hard as nails punk and hooky-danceable-borderline pop that you could show to your pop-loving suburban aunt if you wanted to kill her or something. 

By night’s end, frontman of Frankie and the Witch Fingers Dylan Sizemore was among Zookraught’s biggest admirers, even going as far as to call them one of his favorite bands. 

“It’s insane they even opened for us, because they’re amazing,” Sizemore said. “I wouldn’t even call them an opener, we just played with them tonight.” 

Which brings us neatly to psych rock extraordinaires Frankie and the Witch Fingers, whose current lineup is comprised of the aforementioned Dylan Sizemore on vocals and guitar, Nicole “Nikki Pickle” Smith on bass, Josh Menashe on guitar, Jon Modaff on synths and Nick Aguilar on drums. The lone synth of Trash Classic introductory track Channel Rot heralded their arrival, prickling up the back of my neck and wriggling into my ears. Now that I’ve been infected with the Mind Virus, it is time to begin. 

Cue guitars. The relentless, borderline monotonic ripper T.V. Baby immediately established the cadence of the set. From there on out, it was go, go, go. The jerky stork-like posture dancing of Sizemore, like the hands of a rapidly malfunctioning clock, could practically show you how the music sounded without hearing it. With a head rigidly strapped to a constantly pecking gimbal metronome hybrid apparatus some might refer to as a “perfectly human neck” and a hard V stance akin to an upside down yield sign — which for those of you who don’t have driver’s licenses, means go very fast. He is the visual embodiment of the band’s sound.

While some may think of psych rock as eternally dressed in kaleidoscopic spaced out collages of LSD ambiance, Frankie and the Witch Fingers quote from a very different book. After the mayhem, Sizemore could be heard telling eager young fans about proto-electronic group Crash Course in Science, and it is precisely this kind of out-of-left-field reference that holds the keys to their unique sonic makeup. The high precision playing, the mutating repetition, the synth lead-ins; it all very much evokes the ethos of fringe, punk-inflected techno long before you would ever think of genre staples such as Spiritualized or Pink Floyd. Like motorik refracted through the scuzzed-out fuzz of psych rock. A mutant, a freak, a disgusting and abominable thing. Give me more, I want to keep hanging out with the swamp monster robot.

Will Bishop is a Cal Poly Humboldt journalism major. He is prone to writing essays about things that bother him, and fictional works about things that also bother him but in different ways. A highly bothered individual, and a lover of cinema, music, and large trees/rocks, he can often be found in the woods, dancing to bring down the sky.