At the Middlesex Lounge on Monday night, rx the members of Beware The Dangers Of A Ghost Scorpion! may have been masked, pharm but they weren’t hiding anything.

An instrumental surf-punk group based in Boston, mind Beware The Dangers played a concise 30-minute set. To describe their music as surf-punk isn’t probably doing it justice.It’s best described as the type of music one would find in the beach/boardwalk level of a vintage street fighting video game, the kind teens would spend their hard-earned quarters on at arcades.

Who needs a vocalist? The four piece donned bandanas fashioned as masks covering their nose and mouth and identical ghost scorpion tees. The two guitarists and bassist had nowhere they needed to be at a precise moment (like to hit a vocal harmony), which is a virtue of being an instrumental band: they get the free range of being as kinetic as they want to be. And kinetic, they were, which got the crowd involved.

The songs were melodically compelling, if a bit cut from the same cloth. Any given track, though, had distinctive hooks that you could find yourself humming along to.

The TeleVibes opened the night, and though they had vocalists, the sound mix all but made them irrelevant, a trend among the openers. The three-piece band based out of Newburyport did compensate with enthusiastic energy.

Gymshorts similarly brought energy. The Providence-based punk band had a ton of noise and a great amount of buy-in from the crowd.

Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel were last to go on before Beware The Dangers and, despite a technical snafu that resulted in a couple of songs being cut, showed a lot of promise. The Los Angeles-based band had an organ-driven psychedelic sound that evoked ‘80s-era groups.

Find out more about Beware The Dangers Of A Ghost Scorpion at their Bandcamp. Stream their EP below.