Guerilla Toss Play Dizzying, Brief Set (Great Scott 6/27)

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A Guerilla Toss set defies description, look but let’s give it a shot: Imagine, if you will, a mixed-martial arts/UFC take on the WWE’s Royal Rumble. A hundred participants enter, no-holds-barred, all soundtracked by really intense punk music. Except, in this case, everyone’s a winner and no one, hopefully, has broken a bone. Oh, yeah, there’s also a 15-minute time limit.

That’s what everyone paid $7 to do at Great Scott on Friday night. And while that roughly works out to $1 per two minutes of musical content, excluding openers, it’s a surprisingly good value. (As a brief reminder, people spend at least triple that amount on cheap Red Sox tickets).

Not taking the stage until just as the lights flickered for last call, it was certainly a late show (but not that late). The crowd and the four-piece, Boston-based band were just about as intense as you can get — not letting up for even a second. In fact, had it gone much longer, people would probably be overcome with fatigue.

So, if you have 15 minutes to spare and would like to get out a little pleasant aggression, Guerilla Toss is well worth your time.

I wish I could say the same for the openers, who were all uniformly mediocre, unfortunately. Direct support act Lovely Little Girls, hailing from Chicago, weren’t short on energy, but the songs just fell flat.

Faun and a Pan Flute, a nine-piece Atlanta band, were easily the most promising of the three support acts. There’s something about instrumental jamming involving a marimba that seems just unique enough to win over crowds.

Kicking off the night was another Atlanta act, Magicicada, which was…something…? A solo performance relying on the aid of loops and noise — with the exception of one song joined by members of Faun and a Pan Flute — it certainly bordered on inaccessible.

Head over to Guerilla Toss’ website to glean very little about their sound, but a very humorous list of fake jazz song titles. The band is releasing a cassette with Infinity Cat, which is due out on July 15. Hear “367 Equalizer” below: