Sci-Fi Death Rock Double Feature at the Funhouse Tomorrow...



Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Philip K. Dick is a struggling teenage kid who gets a job at Chuck E Cheese's.

One day, he's surrounded by a swarm of pizza-sauce-encrusted moppets and bored out of his skull. Looking to take the sting of mewling rugrats out of his ears, he sneaks out of counter duty to scam a quick hit of weed in the restaurant's walk-in refrigerator.

While he's in the fridge toking away, the apocalypse hits. It's the Big Kahuna, a Hammer-of-Thor thermonuclear salvo that levels almost all of the country, and vaporizes all of the restaurant's human occupants. Except for Phil.

The dazed pizza-counter jockey staggers out of the walk-in refrigerator to survey the devastation. All of the kids and their parents are piles of powdery ash, and the restaurant (fridge unit excepted) is charred wreckage.
But off in the corner, under the last vestiges of the building's structure, is the Chuck E. Cheese robot band. Some of the automatons retain their mammalian appearances, albeit singed and warped by the nuclear winter. But the atomic blast has singed the fur and exterior off of the largest one. And a funny thing has happened.

Somehow, the radiation has imbued the Chuck E Cheese robots with independent thought. And now, they're ready to rock.

The giant Skeleton Chuck E 'Droid rips Phil off his feet, slapping a dog collar around the would-be author's neck. The machine's metallic mandibles shove a gnarled metallic mask over the poor kid's kisser, and a guitar into the teen's pale and trembling hands. A hollow, tinny voice emerges from the hulking robot:

"You will rock. And you will rock, NOW."

There's a more concise bio of Captured! By Robots on their website, but I like to imagine a more fatalistic backdrop for 'em. Anyway, they'll be touching down at Seattle's Funhouse (one of this town's best sweaty punk clubs) for some metal machine mayhem tomorrow night. I saw them (him?) about two years ago, and I'm still reeling. Again, think Chuck E. Cheeses' in Philip K. Dick Hell. With an industrial-metal backbeat.

AND get there early, because opening for this robotic rock onslaught is Seattle's own Bloodhag, a quartet of sci-fi book-lusting hooligans who pump out the most volcanic death metal you've ever heard. The 'Hag bring the noise in full librarian regalia (refer to the lovely Lilly Warner-shot photo above if you don't believe me), and if you're looking for reading material, lead growler J. B. Stratton hurls sci-fi paperbacks at the audience. Beneath Stratton's Disembowelled-Orc-on-Crystal-Meth snarl lurk some trenchantly hilarious lyrics, all about science fiction authors. And beneath the central conceit is a sharply-played audio assault and a zealot's fervor for book-learnin' rock audiences. If you profess any love for sci-fi, literature, or loudness, you need to be there. Bloodhag call themselves edu-core. I call 'em gods.

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