Decompressing with MegadethGuitarist Kevin Fyfe will feel...

Decompressing with Megadeth

Guitarist Kevin Fyfe will feel less like a salesman and more like a musician when heavy-metal quintet the Confession plays its native Orange County next week. The band is segueing from a dues-paying stint on the Warped Tour to a monthlong slot opening for Megadeth.

“There’s 50 bands a day, a lot of different styles and different crowds,” Fyfe said of the Confession’s second go-round on Warped. “It’s really competitive -- you have to sell yourself a lot, ask people to come see you play. With this next tour, we’ll be the first of three bands, all doing the same kind of thing. Hopefully the crowd will respond.”

It’s another baby step for the fledgling thrashers from south O.C., whose first album for new L.A.-based indie Science Records, “Requiem,” features a twin-guitar assault from Fyfe and Justin Norman and the biting vocals of Taylor Holland Armstrong. With Matt Pauling on bass and Jeff Veta on drums, the Confession made the album with Avenged Sevenfold front man M. Shadows producing.

“He was kind of like a sixth member,” Fyfe says.

The Confession plays Wednesday at the Grove of Anaheim.

Don’t worry, it’s OK to laugh

The Happy Hollows are almost as fun conceptually as they are sonically. They’ve become the latest indie darlings in Silver Lake thanks to an almost pugilistic mix of stinging guitars, turbulent rhythms and shouted vocals.

But frontwoman Sarah Negahdari’s yelping -- is it tortured or is it joyous? And all that racket laid down by bassist Charlie Mahoney and drummer Chris Hernandez: angry or exuberant? Is the trio happy? Or hollow?

“I like it that we straddle the line -- there’s the stone, and then you turn over the stone and see what’s underneath,” she says. “I even love it when I occasionally look out and see people in the crowd laughing. It’s not necessarily the thing you’d think a rock ‘n’ roller would want.”

The Hollows’ sound -- imagine that somebody rewired the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- coalesced quickly. Negahdari had almost given up forming a band in 2005 when she found Washington, D.C., transplants Mahoney and Hernandez on Craigslist. “We got together, played one song, and I said, ‘OK, we’ve got a show in two weeks,’ ” Negahdari says. “Meeting them catapulted me into a different dimension.”

The band’s initial “Bunnies and Bombs” EP earned blogger raves and magazine praise; now the trio is distributing a four-song sampler during its Monday-night residency at the Echo.

The Ziggens take the bait

How has Bert Susanka been spending his time in the five years since his long-running pop eccentrics the Ziggens released an album? Let’s see: Two of the songs on his first solo venture are titled “I’m Going Fishing” and “Let’s Go Fishing” . . .

“I’m actually not that much of a fisherman, but my dad is, and what better way to get your dad to pick up the phone than to write about something he likes?” Susanka says with his characteristic humor.

Orange County’s Ziggens (an early Skunk Records act with Sublime) fused punk-pop, surf and country music with goofy humor over a decade-plus, and Susanka has carried on the sound (and the puns) with his solo “Onward Christian Slater.”

Is there a distinct sensibility in his album, as opposed to the Ziggens’ catalog? “There’s not a distinctly sensible bone in my body,” he says with a laugh. “But no, although a couple songs turned out a little bit more personal maybe.”

Susanka, joined by guitarist Rob Perez (who produced the album), saxophonist/keyboardist Todd Foreman, bassist Gary Fitch and drummer Greg Lauther, will perform Wednesday at the House of Blues Anaheim. The quintet will also be joined by former Sublime producer Miguel Happoldt.

-- Kevin Bronson

www.latimes.com/buzzbands