Pop Music Review : Doctor’s Acts Are No Dream

Nothing can be taken for granted in Orange County any more. The polity is bankrupt, and, as Thursday night’s proceedings at Club 369 revealed, one can now 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, tuneless cast.

Aversion, a veteran crew of OC 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.