The Funhouse sold out on a Monday night? Well played, Portable Shrines. Thanks for psyching up Seattle.

Portable Shrines’ prime movers Darlene Nordyke and Aubrey Nehring kicked off the night with their garage-psych band, Backward Masks. I arrived too late to catch their whole set, but the few songs I did hear found them making positive strides from the last time I caught them at the Comet. Their rhythms seemed to be more driving and the guitars have taken on more interesting textures. We’re going to keep our ears glued to Backward Masks’ developments.

Texas’ Indian Jewelry played shrouded in smoke-machine effluvium. Thus obscured, IJ churned up a tribal-industrial brand of dark, mantric psychedelia that struck me as too rhythmically stodgy to achieve serious/Sirius lift off. That being said, it wouldn’t be too shocking if Trent Reznor tapped these ladies and gents to open for Nine Inch Nails before he finally slams shut the coffin lid on that project. Not that I didn’t like Indian Jewelry, but it was one of those instances where a group’s records (particularly Invasive Exotics and Free Gold) raised hopes that the live show couldn’t meet—at least on this date.

Psychic Ills, on the other sweaty palm, met my liquid-sky-high expectations head-on. Their set slowly unfurled mandalas of dubadelic splendor. The concentric op-art ripples, ridges, and other patterns flickering on and behind them seemed designed to mesmerize just as thoroughly as the music’s infinite, radiating cycles did. This was mirage rock, with all aggression dispersed into a Nirvana’d-out state (not talking ’bout Cobain & Co., either).

Psychic Ills bassist/enchantress Elizabeth Hart shook gourd-like percussion instruments with a ceremonial solemnity as the band eased/oozed into “Meta.” The music instantly charmed one woman to move from the crowd onto the stage, where she danced and sensually coaxed patrons to feel the music as demonstratively as she was. The band—which also includes Brian Tamborello, Jimy SeiTang, and Tres Warren, who essentially sang in a series of staccato “uh”s and made it work—looked on with bemusement at her impromptu movements. A couple of tracks later, a bearded, knit-cap-wearing white guy joined her onstage, but he just added a stalkerish, bad-trip vibe to things, and eventually security yanked him off the stage.

The set leaned heavily on the latest album, the awesome Mirror Eye (including “Mantis,” “Go to the Radio,” and “Fingernail Tea”), with Hart proving herself to be a deft disciple of Holger Czukay’s monotony-as-transcendence style of bass-tone massaging. But the highlight for me was “Untitled” off 2006’s Dins "The Way Of." It’s one of the few current examples of music that recalls the space-dust vortex of Lard Free’s “Spirale Malax.” It really was some of the deepest, dopest psychedelic shit ever. I think many of us had a special moment during this one. The set’s only disappointment was the absence of the ever-escalating bliss-rock anthem “Another Day Another Night.”

It was tremendously encouraging to see such a strong turnout for uncompromising music on a Monday. Let’s hope Portable Shrines can keep this momentum going through this September’s Escalator festival.

Psychic Ills Setlist

Drone in
Meta
Fingernail tea
Clarivoyance
January rain
Mantis
The way of
Recursion
Go to the radio