The New Luck Toy
Thurs Feb 28 at Re-bar.

This is the last One-Night Stand I'll be doing for The Stranger. (I plan to be having many, many more as a civilian, though--haaaaay!) I'm leaving the column in the able hands of Dr. Bradley M. Steinbacher until the paper finds someone who is actually literate enough to replace me. And since this is my final column, I decided I would just say fuck-all to the column's conceit (going at random to check out a local opening band), and instead write about my favorite Thursday-night event in Seattle: Pho Bang!.

It was the best decision I could have made, because last Thursday night's Pho Bang! featured one of my favorite new bands in Seattle, the New Luck Toy. A U.K.-punk-style four- piece, the band features Stevil Dead on vocals and guitar. I am happy to report that Dead, a Herculean oddity of the highest order, is something of a subterranean rock god. His clipped enunciation and herky-jerk head movements channel a beefed-up Buzzcocks, and are punctuated by a visceral scream that would make even Black Francis' back hairs stand on end.

I fucking love this band, people--and so will you. New Luck Toy's cover of Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" (a bizarre but brilliant choice) is a back-alley rape fantasy on a stick. Dead's voice shrieks and squawks through the brash and silly chorus, while drummer Kellie Pain manages to artfully blend precision and primitivism, all the while smiling and looking strangely effervescent. Effervescence is key here: Part of the New Luck Toy's charm is visual. Guitar and bass frottage one another at some point, with Dead biting bassist Steve Centari's shoulder, silly and loving. Later on, Dead accidentally knocks his beer over, and then kneels instinctively down to lap it up off the grimy Re-bar stage, like a dirty little bitch.

One-night stand, indeed.