“Fucking play already,” some guy yells during Bukkake Daydream’s loud and extensive soundcheck. Lead singer Jeff Palacios laughs and humps at the air in front of him. “We’re just going to have 10 minutes of me doing this,” he threatens, but the band starts up, for real, soon after his next pelvic thrust. This chaotic, vulgar, noisy introduction better suits an experimental band named after a messy sex act (they’ve adopted the prude-friendly abbreviation BKKD) than their opening number: smooth-sailing ambience in which Chris Nunez and Jared “AWOL” Hooks’ airy guitar lines float calmly across bassist Victor Alfaro’s liquid low end while Palacios coos, soft and unintelligible.
But that bit of pleasantness is over soon enough, and for the rest of the night, Bukkake’s beauty comes in spurts. “Agree to Disagree” begins the ambush with a rude burst of unexpected hardcore violence. Drummer Justin Espinoza shifts the band into higher gear while Palacios screams like he’s red-lining with a blown head gasket. The floor beneath the band is soaking wet for some reason (probably better left unexplored) and Nunez slips when he staggers into the audience, wielding his guitar like a chainsaw maniac.
“Can I get a towel up here, por favor?” Palacios asks and winds up mopping at a massive puddle with a rag 1/10th the size, which becomes saturated almost instantly. Amazingly, nobody gets hurt, unless you count a packed bar’s worth of ringing ears.
Alfaro’s thick, complex bassline sometimes deadens the angular ax-work’s dental-drill bite, and the musical misanthropy is often brightened with brief passages of shoe-gaze and psychedelia. The band’s proggy time changes require some technical ability, and coupled with Palacios’s impressive vocal versatility, BKKD could develop this schizophrenic approach into its own coherent style, but for now the mood swings are highly compartmentalized, so most songs sound less like genre-defying slipstream statements than mismatched sound collages, a shoebox of randomly cut tape loops you’ve got to paste together yourself.