“Randy Orton Is Wearing A Shirt, He Will NOT Be Fighting / Randy Orton Is NOT Wearing A Shirt, He Will Be Fighting” is the title of a track from Kalispell band SuperPlex, and it tells you a lot of what you need to know — about them, and about the event they’re playing this week at the ZACC.
The song, which is on the band’s new EP The Undercard, opens with brooding bass and drums and layers in audio from a 2006 WWE storyline, when pro-wrestler Randy Orton interrupted Rey Mysterio, who was honoring Eddie Guerrero, and claimed Eddie wasn’t in heaven — he was in hell. (The angle was controversial at the time, and even Orton felt weird about it, apparently.) Here, it’s reworked into a slow-building, stonergaze soundscape that breaks open halfway through. It’s great — reminds me of something off Dischord Records, like the way Hoover or Nation of Ulysses used talking and sampling to build tension in a kind of menacing but mesmerizing way.
SuperPlex is one of three Montana punk bands playing Friday night at the ZACC as part of Moshoula, a show that includes actual, live wrestling — backyard-style, as it should be. The event is being put on by Daisy Chain Presents, the local crew behind a lot of Missoula’s better punk and indie bookings, in collaboration with The Lucha Project, a national group that appears to be bringing the wrestling portion of the night — wrestlers included.
The other bands are just as locked into the theme. Missoula’s Folding Chair (as in the folding chairs you smash over another wrestler’s head) will be playing fast-and-furious hardcore punk with gang vocals and a lot of mosh-pit, dust-up energy. Their songs are over not long after they start — quick flashes of intensity that provide just enough musical DNA to be traced directly back to some crusty late 1980s, early 1990s East Coast hardcore.
My brother described them as “very specifically ’90s Cleveland hardcore” because of Tony Erba’s bands, which are really similar in sound and are also about pro-wrestling. He saw Erba’s band Gordon Solie Motherfuckers in 1998 and says it was the wildest show he’s ever seen where “people were throwing strings of lit firecrackers into the mosh pit, along with bags of flour, chairs and a couch.”
Anaconda Vise, from Bozeman, is listed as “prog vs. punk,” which is accurate. (I love that it’s “vs” as if the two genres are fighting each other). They sound tight and off-kilter, plus melodic in a shoegaze kind of way, but sped up. The band’s name is, of course, yet another wrestling thing. It refers to a submission hold popularized by the WWE’s CM Punk.
Now, I don’t know if these bands were created as one-offs for this show or if “wrestle punk” is now a genre. I hope it is. The wrestling side of the night probably has some version of theatrical violence, elbow drops, and maybe even a tag-team betrayal, all in DIY style. It sounds like a good idea to me.
Moshoula is Fri., July 25 at 7:30 PM @ The ZACC. $20. All ages. More info and tickets.
