Pop : BH Surfers Bear Down On the Music

The BH Surfers still rule in rock’s lunatic fringe, but their grip isn’t so tight as it was when they hit the circuit eight years ago out of the wilds of Texas with their aggressively crude name (abbreviated here) and a gleeful fascination with the extremes of the human experience.

Chaos can become as boring as perfect craft, so they’ve given up some of the edge and taken a stab at accessibility. With so many groups espousing deep mayhem and terror emerging from the industrial and metal undergrounds, the once-fearsome Surfers now seem almost like a benign force.

But a force they remain. Moving up to the 4,000-head level of the Hollywood Palladium on Friday, the quartet bore down on their music, abandoning the old three-ring circus atmosphere for prolonged, intense jams.

Gone are the naked dancer and the mesmerizing double-drummers, but the Surfers still screen squirmy, slicing film footage you don’t want to look at too closely, Gibby Haynes still sings through a bullhorn and whacks a burning cymbal to send flames leaping high, and they’ve added a huge wall of strobe lights to the arsenal. It’s a ritualized performance that’s now closer to the Grateful Dead than Throbbing Gristle.