Mercy Lounge Rings in Anniversary With The Features, Promised Land Sound, Music Band and More

With 12th and Porter closing next month and many other local haunts getting shut down, bought out, revamped and replaced, what looks to be one of 2015’s hottest trends is a scary one indeed. That said, Music City’s premier live-music multiplex Mercy Lounge has been steadily swimming in the opposite direction for officially 12 years now, growing one tiny room into what now encompasses the big-boy Cannery Ballroom, medium-sized Mercy Lounge, the cozy High Watt, and their third-floor event space One. Recently, a good chunk of the staff graduated to become small-business owners of their own. The place has upward mobility dripping off the barstools.

As usual, Mercy’s annual birthday celebration Saturday night featured an all-star lineup of local talent and invited patrons to party free of charge. The Spin arrived to find the place predictably packed, with house-party punks Sexx — not to be confused with JEFF the Brotherhood’s early incarnation The Sex — finishing just moments before our arrival.

With bands alternating and often overlapping on both The High Watt and Mercy stages, crowds typically pooled in one room or the other. Since the stages were so close in proximity, the simultaneous scheduling was less the Sophie’s Choice-style dilemma of bigger-festival viewing and more like channel surfing as The Spin ambled back and forth from room to room. In these conditions, Music Band’s trio-powered psych-rock tunes sounded more stripped-down than usual at the High Watt, compared to the exceptionally more eclectic ensemble ELEL nearby at Mercy Lounge.

Music Band’s newer tunes seemed a slight departure from their '60s acid-fetish rock 'n’ soul, drifting in more the direction of '70s power pop. With so much second- and third-hand lysergic nostalgia going around these days, The Spin is a fan of the progress. Meanwhile, local eight-piece ELEL rocked a cacophonous indie-pop style full of the syncopation, calls, responses and burbling guitars that trickled up from David Byrne’s world-music forays, homogenized into a wholly Western sound that often leaves us aching for the rawness of authentic Third World grooves.

Next up, we got a double dose of Amer-rock-cana as Promised Land Sound in The High Watt had cosmic, countrified rock 'n' roll boogie on lockdown, counterpointed just so with the considerably smoother and more delicate homestyle stylings of Escondido in Mercy. There was a lot of twang and verb in the air, which somehow translated into tipping back our beers a little faster than usual. And our drunken state made an criminally short, 30-minute Features set feel like it was shorter than an 8 off 8th appearance. The band killed, of course, rocking out recent favorites like "This Disorder" and binding spells with old chestnuts like "The Gates of Hell" before all was said and done in the main room.

At the end of it all, oddball party rockers Hot Tub Club closed out the night with a set of absurdest festive jams. With a ragtag ensemble of emcees in tow, the Club’s ski-masked frontman — who also disguises his voice through a low-register modulator — would make for a mysterious and enigmatic ringleader, if his delicate frame and neon hi-jinks didn’t carry the unmistakable reek of local promoter, huckster and agent provocateur Brandon Jazz. HTC’s mishmash of hip-hop and electro buffoonery often doesn’t seem to have any more idea of what it’s doing than we do, but the spectacle is at least disorienting enough to keep us from having to guess whether it’s good or bad.