Wailing and Gnashing Until Sky Cries Mary : Pop music review: Roderick Romero’s space rock comes out like sunshine after the storm of Sweet 75 and the sheer noise of Hovercraft.

A sluice of Seattle came to Southern California on Thursday night as three of the grunge capital’s up-and-coming alterna-mongers held court for a sparse but properly uniformed assemblage of resolutely arty-looking fans at the Coach House.

First up was Hovercraft, featuring Sadie T, a.k.a. Beth Liebling, a.k.a Eddie Vedder’s wife, on bass, Campbell 200 on guitar and Karl on drums. The group performed 30 nonstop minutes of unlistenable instrumental white noise at a volume that had even the trendiest-looking in the front rows holding their beleaguered ears closed.

Campbell’s guitar “technique” consisted solely of sticking a flat piece of wood between the strings and fretboard and flailing a slide across the neck, while a bank of effects made noises straight out of Edgar Winter’s cheeso classic, “Frankenstein.”

Sadie hung a cigarette from her lips and did her dour best to look like a way-cool junkie while plying her own non-musician magic on the bass, and Karl just looked lost and confused as he tried his utmost to keep semblance of a beat to the insufferable mess. Meanwhile, images of astronauts, insects, lava flows, heavy machinery flashed across the screen.

John Cage it definitely wasn’t. It wasn’t even Ned Lagin, for that matter. Hell, it even managed to make Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” seem positively symphonic by comparison. This wasn’t grunge; it was more like sludge--too monotonous to even be classified as entertainingly nerve-racking, it was merely pretentious, stupid and, worst of all, boring. Of all the concerts I’ve ever reviewed over the years, Hovercraft has the distinction of playing the worst set I’ve ever been subjected to. Really. I mean it.

Next up was Sweet 75, featuring ex-Nirvana guitarist and bassist Krist Novoselic; Eva Las Vegas (nice name at least) on vocals, bass and guitar; and William Reifflin on drums.

While Las Vegas bore an amusing resemblance to Donald Duck, she unfortunately sounded much like the hotheaded cartoon character as well, as she sneered, snarled and spat her way through a set of “I am proud to have a bad attitude” neo-punk rock. Novoselic performed his best “I’m a rock star, damn it” stage flailage, played really, really bad 12-string guitar and engaged in woefully unfunny stage patter (“Where are all the people with the clove cigarettes?”) while proving conclusively that Cobain was a one-man muse.

Reifflin, at least, flashed some solid drum chops, but this was strictly Sub Par Grunge 1A, lacking conviction, memorable material and, most of all, originality. For Novoselic, it’s a long, hard fall from Nirvana to this.

*

The evening was redeemed by techno-hippie space rockers Sky Cries Mary, whose droning, ethereal vibe was truly music to the ears following the hour or so of unadulterated garbage that preceded.

Composed of husband and wife vocalists Roderick and Anisa Romero, keyboardist and guitarist Gordon Raphael, guitarist Michael Cozzi, bassist Juano, drummer Bennett Ireland and DJ Todd Robbins, Sky Cries Mary proffered a puissant brand of power psychedelia that is influenced by such disparate forces as Hawkwind, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and “Avalon”-era Roxy Music but remains uniquely its own.

The Romeros are an effective vocal team both sonically and visually--he looks like a tattooed Hassidic rabbi and she like a Hindu fan dancer--with voices that meld and play off one another to an intoxicatingly hypnotic effect. The band pumped and throbbed through reverb-steeped layers of opulent sound, and their own screen of lysergic-inspired graphics added to the somniferous ambience.

On display on the side of the stage was a booth demonstrating the group’s forthcoming CD Plus album, an intriguing new format that mixes audiovisual media and is playable on both PCs and standard compact disc players. According to Raphael, the new software will be priced no higher than an audio compact disc.