Natural Child Goes Hard at Little Harpeth

"Y'all see that Weed Clown around here?" asked Natural Child co-frontman Wes Traylor, tuning his bass a few songs into Saturday night's headlining set. Hell yeah, The Spin saw the Weed Clown. And the Beer Goblin, and maybe even the Tequila Monster — oh, you mean the dude with the big red nose and the pot leaves painted on his face? We saw him, too.

But seriously, the release show for Okey Dokey, the Child's sixth full-length and first on their homegrown eponymous label, was just the kind of party we were looking for — a raucous, sweaty warehouse hang that reminded us of long nights at defunct local venue The Zombie Shop, but with a few key upgrades that our aging ears and asses appreciated.

The show went down on a portable stage, high enough to see from anywhere in the room. The P.A. was plenty powerful and didn't sound like it had been run over by a bus, though being in a giant metal-and-concrete box is always going to limit how clear you can get — we barely heard a note from the keyboardist sitting in with Natty Child. The floor was clean, level and free of rags coated in industrial lubricant, giant wind-turbine-looking ceiling fans kept the air moving, and there were plenty of port-a-potties. The only bummer was that the intermittent drizzle forced the show inside Little Harpeth Brewing's loading dock — the skyline would've been a nice backdrop for this all-local bill featuring some of the best damn bands in the biz of local rock.

The Paperhead started the proceedings around rock o'clock (that's 9 p.m. for n00bs) with some new tunes in their Barrett-era-Floyd-ian idiom. One thing that sets this group apart from their peers in this style is that they play like they know jazz. When they go off into space, it's not an every-man-for-himself freakout, but the kind of more fluid, controlled jam you get when a band knows how to communicate within itself.

We saw Coupler at our birthday party last weekend, but let's be honest: Were we holding down the couch on this foggy Saturday night, we'd be listening to something similar to this group, whose sound we recently described to someone as "an electronic flower unfolding." Like we're used to seeing at Nashville rock shows that include an experimental act, half the audience was spellbound by the organic machinations of core Coupler trio Ryan Norris, Rodrigo Avendano and Rollum Haas, while the other half went to refill their beers.

Faux Ferocious took the stage next, fierce as a honey badger with a face full of porcupine quills. We see them seldom enough that we forget just how hard their endless melting boogie hits. Some kind of screeching howl roamed around in the sound system for most of the set. Every time it reared its ugly little head, it seemed to egg the band into playing wilder and faster, which they and the fans who were crammed up in the front row enjoyed immensely.

While Jem Cohen and Jeff Pettit from local record shop Fond Object soundtracked the set break with a stream of vintage rock 'n' psych 'n' soul from the turntables (hi, there, Link Wray!), we prepared ourselves for a chilled-out cosmic time courtesy of the Child. After all, space is one of the defining features of Okey Dokey, a record where Bitchin Bajas' Cooper Crain helps the band settle into a Venn diagram including their Dead-iest and Stones-iest tendencies plus a hint of Craig Leon's post-punk-y electronic explorations.

Once the band kicked in, we got a healthy taste of that for sure, from Okey cuts including "Sure Is Nice" and "Now and Then," and even a wistful cover of CCR's "Lodi" around mid-set. But the main mode of the evening was blooze blastin', running the gamut from lanky, in-the-pocket grooves to balls-to-the-wall sonic assaults. Old favorites like "Blind Owl Speaks" and "Laid, Paid and Strange" got downright nasty as guitar man Seth Murray's molten-gold leads streamed out. Could there be any better way to cap the night than to encore with "B$G P$MP$N," which turned the first few rows of Childheads into a giddy mosh pit, which carried Weed Clown around like a conquering hero? We think not.