In a face-melting fusion of hard rock and LSD, the Entrance Band churns out music that sounds like an acid trip gone straight to hell.
In front of a crowd dense with fringed leather and body odor, Blakeslee (a dead ringer for George Harrison circa All Things Must Pass) shed his shirt--and his inhibitions--as the Entrance Band began their set on the Jackpot on Saturday night in a masterfully spewed Jackson Pollock-like smattering of sound.
While the Entrance Band's songwriting is sprawling, it isn't sloppy: For all the quavering vocals and guitar noodling, the trio exhibited extremely tight technique. There was no static or dissonant note out of place in the band's pristine psychedelia. Rollicking bass and guitar lines grounded extended solo jams in rich layers of tie-dyed rock, and cascading guitar lines flowed like curtains of the band members' long hair. (Derek James, the drummer, looked like Cousin Itt from the Addams family for the majority of the set.) For physically appearing as though they were exerting minimal effort, the symphonic amount of sound flowing out of this trio was astounding.
The air was thick with the band's instrumental chaos and shouted invocations. Frequently speaking in a language primarily made up of new age cliches, the Entrance Bands' lyrics would be trite if the sheer instrumental power behind them wasn't so intense. In true hippie form, Blakeslee hollered a quavering speech ("Where fear has gone, there will be nothing, and only I will remain") before catapulting into "Lookout!," the Entrance Band's strongest number of the night. During a deep solo session, Blakesee reached up to palm the Jackpot's ceiling, and immediately fell to the floor while ripping on his guitar strings in a (nearly) carnal embrace.
The band's meditative jam sessions extended out of enough explosive inertia to sustain themselves, but the longer instrumental stretches found the crowd laughing, chatting, and making shadow puppets in the band's static lighting. Granted, the Entrance Band was certainly toeing the edge of the jam band abyss--but they stayed true enough to their blues roots to draw themselves back from pure chaos.
After eight numbers, the band signed off, hopping off stage to snag beers (and in Blakselee's case, a black and gold sweater), tipping off the crowd that the trip was over.
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