Doctor Dream Night at 369 Dispenses With Tunefulness

Nothing can be taken for granted in Orange County anymore. The polity is bankrupt and, as Thursday night’s proceedings at Club 369 revealed, one now can spend an entire evening with three Doctor Dream bands and not find a penny’s worth of tunefulness.

Entering its 10th year, Doctor Dream is the county’s best-established alternative rock label, a heretofore reliable purveyor of catchy pop-punk and college-rock. But, bowing to harsher youth-market tastes begotten of harsher times, most of its recent signings have a metalloid, un-melodic cast.

Aversion, a veteran crew of O.C. speed-metalists, headlined with a pretty good impersonation of hell’s cavalry. The stampede was impressively honed and unfettered and included welcome slow-tempo respite. But over the course of 50 minutes of indecipherable howling, it grew overbearing.

The opening band, Fifty Lashes, is a Bay Area foursome that offered speed metal with a twist: The band actually has a capacity for humor and an earthy sense of human scale rare in its genre. Singer Bradley Wood could sound wry and bemused as well as overwrought, and while the set included at least one song full of fear and loathing about impending planetary doom, it included another full of fear and loathing at the prospect of having to take out month-old garbage.

In Bitch Funky Sex Machine’s concept, the vocalist growls and rasps like Motorhead’s Lemmy while everybody plays as heavily as possible, taking cues from Black Sabbath and early Soundgarden. This outing was scattered, with only flickers of the crude and simple, but focused, sonic brutality that works best for the band.