Beefus, Bunnygrunt, Googolplexia

press release: The world's only purveyors of skeezy skunk-funk and meta-meat-fork feedcore jive, BEEFUS are an 8-piece ensemble with an urgent message for all hu-mans. It's hard for mortal minds to figure out just what this message means sometimes, but it has to do with hellbeast squid lords, faceless corporate torture-minions, and sexy mutants of many limb-configurations coming together to lay eggs and rejoice. Irresistibly devolved and weirder than Rod Serling's happy meal toy, BEEFUS show will leave you blissfully brain-drained and eating the dirt from between your toes. For tonight's performance, BEEFUS have gone Full Blewgrass and will port rustic lyres of appropriate bucolic minstrelsy.

Bunnygrunt started off twee but spent so much time on the road that they learned how to rock. The missing link between Teenage Fanclub and Teenage Wasteland, like a bat out of hell baby, Bunnygrunt was born to run. They’ve been tearing it up for years now—legends of the underground teaching the indie kids how to rock and the rockers how to weep.

With his electric banjo and ukulele, accordion and trombone kazoo, Robert Severson has crafted Saint Louis, Missouri's Googolplexia into a one-man outsider vaudeville. Severson stomps, claps, and gurgles into the disparate, cobwebbed corners of American music and sometimes beyond. Song to song, Googolplexia swings between styles and strategies, evoking Elvis, Belafonte, Whitney Houston, Gene Austin, Andy Kaufman, The Ink Spots, Yves Montand, karaoke, opera-from-scratch, improv comedy, Shakespeare, Smokey Robinson, gypsy, calypso, bal-musette . . . ; but whether it's a song about a giant monster fish, heartbreak and working fast food, his beloved Volvo 240, or even an off-the-cuff cover, Severson's crackling, three-steps-ahead wit and pyrotechnical phrasing give the songs beating hearts.