Last night was the 4th anniversary party for music marketing company Musebox, and they took the opportunity to throw themselves a party with, oddly, no one on their roster performing. Instead it was Telephoned, Sunglasses, Soundpool and Tobacco with free 24 oz cans of PBR and one of the more diverse crowds I’d yet seen at Glasslands Gallery.

Glasslands Gallery is a small performance space that has a tendency to host artists who have graduated from house shows but not yet gained the cache to play larger “real” venues. It has struck me as one of the classier rungs on the ladder having two working toilets, a full bar and a strict enforcement of the smoking ban. There’s usually some interesting installation or sculpture to catch your eye and it’s usually quite dark. Kind of a pain to shoot photos, but with a good system and good sound engineer, it’s a great place to see a show.

Tobacco is a member of avant pop group Black Moth Super Rainbow. BMSR makes strange pop music, which is content to play with structure and sounds but stripping the immediate humanity from the genre, playing up the production aspect of modern pop music to create music that is familiar while also surreal enough to require an investment from the listener. Sequencing psychedelica, electronics and pop into a wonderfully loose assemblage of sound.

Tobacco’s two solo albums Fucked Up Friends and Maniac Meat play more like an aggressive street bass heavy riff off of BMSR, fusing sounds and styles of glitch music with that surreal pop of his band project.

Fucked Up Friends sounds more like a combination of Mr Oizo, a library album collection and a broken keyboard. Filled with sketches along with songs, the first album seemed more like a dumping ground for unused or unrealized ideas as there wasn’t any singular artistic statement separating it from his work with BMSR.

From what I’ve heard of Maniac Meat, there’s a bit more cohesion, giving us our first Tobacco album rather than our first Tobacco collection.

I hadn’t had the opportunity to see either BMSR or Tobacco perform live, though I enjoyed both acts, so I leapt at the invite. That there was free beer involved, was a bit of a bonus.

Opening act Telephoned is DJ/Producer Sammy Bananas and vocalist Maggie Horn playing big box house music, bringing to mind Circuit House diva tours of the 90s, where a woman would sing her lungs out over pulsing, tribal house rhythms as a DJ played instrumental versions of the songs to a room full of sweaty, shirtless white collar gays. Telephoned tapped into that experience perfectly, but the bewildered audience didn’t quite know what to do with a room full of big anthemic house at 9:30 PM.

Telephoned got their start by turning T-Pain’s “Can’t Believe It” into a house hit, and that restructuring of genres and collapsing of tracks was on display last night as cover versions of hardcore anthem Awesome 3’s “Don’t Go”, Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” and a kind of goofy dub speed version of The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love.” Frankly, I was in love from the first minutes of the set. You can download the EXCELLENT mixtape Off The Hook here and if you get the chance, see them live. It’s a lot of fun, and you can play “What’s that sample” if you’re not too busy dancing your ass off.

I hated Sunglasses when they started playing. It was a combination of “What is this dreck” at their starting with a beatless intro that was like a chain, choking the life from the party that Telephoned had just created. This abject hated continued as layers of fuzz and muffled synthesis combined with vocals reverbed to hell and back provided a kind of hippie Salem feel. “Art students,” I shuddered.

Then, something happened with the music. It wasn’t art anymore. It was dance. Energy. Verve. It was life. Stripped of the funeral wrappings and the god awful excess of effects, the music came to life as it shrugged off the weight of what came before. By the end of the set, I was really into what they were doing. I just wish that it had been like this from the start, as it was like seeing two different acts on that stage with those instruments.

Soundpool billed itself as Shoegaze and Disco House and that’s about as accurate a description as you can find. The rhythm section was rock solid, if a bit bland, as the drummer wasn’t given much to do but provide a steady four to the floor beat with off hand hat hits and the bassist was rarely let out of his cage. The star of the show was the guitarist John Ceparno guitar and effects work ranged from the deceptively simple work of funk guitar to the complex instrumentation needed for shoegaze, yet even the “funk” aspects were given delicious walls of fuzz. There was a visual aspect, but Glasslands is not the best place for it, so it was a bit extraneous in that venue. Soundpool was some excellent discoid funk, space funk, funkgaze, discogaze, or whatever bullshit genre term you want to create for it.

Tobacco live was a bit overwhelming for the space. The crushing bass from the sound system threatened to shake the building to the ground and grind your teeth to dust against each other. The broken step sequencer rhythm and the bass where all I could easily discern as the more subtle elements of the tracks got lost. Though this didn’t matter when all I wanted a handful of pills and a glass of whiskey so I could will myself into the soundscape of Tobacco’s performance.

Tobacco was joined onstage by fellow Black Moth member The Seven Fields of Aphelion running a keyboard and providing additional programming to his guitar, vocals, sequencing and keyboard work. There was rumor that Beck was going to show up to provide vocal duties at one point, but that didn’t pan out.

The set was great, as there was no gap between tracks as each song was shoved into one another like a great hip hop set, cutting between tracks. The sound and the fury and the sweat. It was a good set, though I’ll have to confess to a bit of exhaustion by the end of it. Grand music but oppressive in one chunk.