Pop : Brotherly Byplay Buoys Blackbird at Club Lingerie

Tony Kinman punches up a drum pattern on a little box and plants himself at the microphone. Stern and expressionless, he thumps out a line on his battered bass and starts singing in a low, rumbling voice that’s rich with doom and foreboding.

To his left, his brother Chip Kinman slinks around the stage as he coaxes layers of harmonics, feedback and echo from his shiny red guitar. It seems to give him such a charge that he can’t stop smiling. He regularly goes to his knees to work on his electronic gadgets, and he stares conspiratorially into the faces of the audience, like a spike-haired Harpo Marx.

That was Blackbird’s Friday show at Club Lingerie, where the brotherly byplay brought a lightness and entertainment value to what on paper and record is an often sober enterprise.

While Blackbird has grown more accessible since its early days, the L.A.-based duo remains in a realm of sonic experimentation and rock fundamentalism that goes straight back to the classic obsession/celebration yin-yang of the Velvet Underground/Beach Boys polarity.

It puts them in today’s ballpark with the Jesus and Mary Chain, but the Kinmans’ unique contribution is a timelessness that hints of rock’s primary roots. Tony’s lonesome prairie voice recalls the haunted, country slant of their previous band, Rank and File, and at the Lingerie they even accommodated Little Richard, finding a way to make “Lucille” go stomping toward the cutting edge.