POP MUSIC REVIEW : Typhoon at Eye of Limbo Show

The Limbo Lounge is a singular pop-culture phenomenon: a roving, weekly music and performance club. The closest thing in Los Angeles to New York’s notorious East Village hot spot the Pyramid, the Limbo Lounge has an atmosphere blending post-punkish black-leather chic, surreal raunchiness and sexual ambiguity.

This week the Lounge took over a tiny disco in a Hollywood mall on Thursday, presenting a show geared toward androgyny, with a sharp performance by a female impersonator named Lip Synka and an appearence by trashy transsexual rocker Jayne County. But the center of the evening was Typhoon, a female rock group from San Francisco.

Typhoon blew through the kind of heavy, slightly mysticized dream-dirge territory mapped out by groups like Siouxsie & the Banshees and X-mal Deutschland. Stocky singer Maxine Cottrell was a constantly moving bundle of sinewy, forceful energy as she growled and wailed her way through pieces like “Safe Sex.”

Though the poor sound system rendered the lyrics indecipherable (except for some predictable Gothic buzzwords like blood and gray ), pieces like “Ishtma,” with its eerie slide guitar and Middle Eastern drumming, conveyed a kind of dreamy paranoia, both entrancing and slightly unsettling. These were not sweet dreams. Typhoon also plays the Zombie Zoo tonight and Club Lingerie on Sunday.