Disco Biscuits: Hard and heavy

By Joshua Gross

Daily Arts Writer

The Disco Biscuits are a mule. Their music is a genetic miscalculation, a freak combination, an amalgamation of species. Their style is refreshingly unique, a combination of jam-rock and techno blended together like salty and sweet ingredients in a recipe for booty-shaking. And although the band shares the mule's hybridity, they certainly lack its sterility.

On Saturday night the Disco Biscuits performed at the Michigan Theater to an audience eager to have their aural electrons rearranged. Over a short three-year career, the Disco Biscuits developed a reputation of catering to the tastes of their fans while simultaneously pleasing their own musical palettes. Their throng of devotees, growing with every performance, has discovered that listening to the Disco Biscuits jam is like embarking on an Amazonian safari without a guide. Saturday's performance was such a safari, as the audience crossed pulsating mountains and slid down vast ambient plains, dancing until their hearts burst out of their chests. The show began with a small, excited audience, slightly tense as if waiting for the results of an unknown medical examination. Surrounded by calm, meandering bass lines and docile guitar licks, many, ensnared by the music, let their guard drop.

This temporary relaxation is shattered beyond repair by a sudden technological ambush. The dreadlocks and Birkenstocks began to fade out while the trancelike throttle of a day-glow rave fades in. The bass kicked up and the beat tumbled down. Mechanical screeches and utopian swishes swelled and burst like Digweedian bubbles. Blatantly masochistic in their playing style, the Biscuits nearly sacrificed themselves onstage while playing such marathon songs (songs that clocked in at anywhere between five and 35 minutes) as "The Unspoken Rhyme" and "Magellan," while displaying their ox-like stamina with a nonstop first set: "Jigsaw Earth > Hope, Plan B > Jigsaw Earth > Plan B, Jam > Helicopters." The band pulls this metamorphosis during every performance, growing wings and flying into uncharted techno territory. This Saturday's show was such a creature, the strange hybrid that is the music of the Disco Biscuits, taking off like a spaceship launch and bringing jaws hurtling towards the floor.