I wasn’t expecting to see David Yow, of The Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid, opening for a modern day bass-and-drum two piece composed of preternaturally good looking 20-something-year old twins on Friday night but that’s what I got a dose of Friday night at the Flipper and The Garden show at House of Blues. Kumo 99, an electronic duo out of Los Angeles, opened.

For those who don’t know (and the crowd seemed full of people who do know), Flipper is a grunge scene staple who influenced Mudhoney and Nirvana. Kurt Cobain, who advocated for smaller bands hardcore when he was at the top of his celebrity, made the band a household name (or at least image) when he drew their fish logo on the t-shirt he wore for a Nirvana performance on Saturday Night Live. 

But obviously Flipper is so much more than the image on Kurt’s shirt. They were known as the anti-punk punk scene guys in the ‘80s and ‘90s and Friday night, you could see why. Singer/showman Yow swiveled across the stage and played with his phone coyly for the duration of the set, sometimes pausing to take a selfie and others to film the audience, paying seemingly a compliment and a critique of the audience simultaneously. (Guitarist Ted Falconi, a Vietnam vet, started the band in 1979 in San Francisco). The crowd, laced with smartly dressed Tulane gals with a touch of clown/jester glam make up (in a nod to headliners, The Garden, who perform in Joker-style aesthetics),  loved it, obviously, and sang along furiously in sync. If you are wondering if they sang along to Flipper, yes they did. So to paraphrase Dalton Spangler, keep your gender biases to yourself.

By the time The Garden took the stage, you could hear the female identifying portion of the crowd swooning. Brothers Wyatt and Fletcher Shears are identical twins who sometimes model for high fashion houses like Yves Saint Laurent and it’s almost impossible to tell them apart, especially with the Insane Clown Posse meets Darkthrone jester makeup. It’s hard to describe what they do, as well. There’s a subtle yet grandiose nod to Jokers of great, such as Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix with twisted hand gestures in leather gloves and the occasional somersault that is eerily effortless. You can’t necessarily call them art rock but they are mostly DIYers (briefly signed to Epitah) with a roster of 10 studio albums and EPs made mostly of thumping Prodigy-esque punk and rap. It’s so hard to really explain what they perform and do which is why they coined the term “vada vada” to explain their art for art’s sake. 

The New Orleans crowd, with a weakness for theatrics, ate them up, devouring songs that are ferociously catchy like “Hit Eject,” screaming along, “They sell poison so they can sell pills/I hit the road a lot so I can pay bills/Some people shoot a lot, some people kill/Some of you deserve to die, but probably never will.” To describe it feels insane, like trying to dance about architecture or understand, absorb, and explain the catalog of local artist Feck. Is it a scene from a DC film and something is about to go horribly wrong? Horribly right? Is it product placement for Zillow? (They open with a banger called “Haunted House on Zillow”).

It’s hard to explain so, to use the twins’s term for when you can’t put something into terms (so to speak), “vada vada.”