POP MUSIC REVIEWS : King Missile Blasts Off

If the band King Missile--currently of “Detachable Penis” fame--had anything resembling an attitude, it would be insufferable. Its origins are in singer-lyricist John S. Hall’s stint on the New York poetry and performance-art front, and his rants--sometimes sung with a whine, often spoken--tend to play out like that school of modern poetry that’s like stand-up comedy without the punch lines. So you have reason to expect the worst: detachable ironic superiority.

But Hall didn’t take himself any more seriously than an absurdist stand-up comic at King Missile’s packed Whisky show on Tuesday, and the resulting rip-’em-up show was an unpretentious, if sophomoric, gas.

Hall--who looks a lot like Peter Brady, and smiles about as much and dances about as soulfully, too--proved an amiable goofball of a host, especially when leading the excellent three-piece band through thrashy power-pop novelty tunes from the group’s earlier independent albums. The new major-label collection, “Happy Hour,” provided the set welcome ballast with more musical variety and just a tad more existential weight. The penultimate encore was typical Missile: a sardonic treatise advocating theft from the workplace, to the tune of David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.”