Pop Reviews : Mind Over Four at Hollywood Live

Some long hair was tossed, a well-muscled lead singer named Spike found a way to remove his shirt midway through the first song, a whammy bar shrieked NNNGAOOOWWww- wee- wee-wee! But what the Orange County band Mind Over Four played at the club Hollywood Live on Thursday was far more dissonant than anything you’d expect from journeyman hard-rockers.

Mind Over Four’s music is at that point where post-punk runs headlong into heavy metal, where a song might start with a crunching riff that Ozzy might give his left fang for and continue with a swirlly Siouxsie drone, or a jazzy ska groove might merge into a pan-tonal Brecht-Weill beat. Spike specializes in both the intense, keening wail favored by post-Zep rockers and the low-key Steven Tyler rock-god thing.

The band wouldn’t have sounded that unusual at Al’s Bar or the Anticlub half a dozen years ago, just another art band whose guitarist had figured out how to tweak a Stratocaster through a Marshall stack. But within the context of big-deal L.A. hard rock Mind Over Four seems almost revolutionary.