Sep 21, 2009
Peelander-Z
It starts with a bassist in a foam-rubber squid suit and ends with the drum kit set up in the middle of the crowd. In between, Peelander-Z’s live show is such mind bogglingly glorious spectacle that you can’t help but wonder if someone has dosed your gin and tonic. Hailing from Japan, Peelander is a three-piece, four-chord dose of Power Ranger-costumed absurdity with an infectious energy and absolute devotion to making sure everyone in the room has the type of fun mostly reserved for seven-year-olds in ball pits. Most of their tunes are thrashy, call-and-response heavy pop-punk numbers such as “Ninja High School,” “Karaoke Party,” and “So Many Mikes” – a song about the large number of Americans they meet named Mike – but what their songs lack in nuance they make up for in unadulterated Good Times. “Audience participation” is not a strong enough term to describe what goes on at a show where random fans are pulled on stage to play the band’s instruments while the actual musicians set up a human bowling lane in the audience. All these oddities serve to sever the performer/spectator dynamic normally present at rock shows and instead foster an entirely unique collaborative atmosphere. Yellow, the frontman, boasts that he and his band mates are not human, just Peelander. By the time their set ends, you won’t find that implausible.