Messer Chups performing this weekend in New Haven.
Spooky sounds emanated from Cafe Nine Saturday night. Instead of sending shivers up spines, it kept a crowd smiling and shuffling from side to side for a nonstop hour.
The sounds came from Messer Chups (roughly, “knife lollipops”), a garage surf-rock band based in St. Petersburg, Russia. The monster-movie-inspired guitar-bass-drum trio, the latest iteration of a band formed in 1998, played the Crown Street club fresh off the West Coast first leg of a U.S. tour.
Taking the stage shortly after 10 p.m., they slid right into a steady rockabilly groove that kept chugging with only the slightest of pauses between numbers for occasional single-phrase banter (“Thank you!” “(Indistinguishable)” “Merch!”).
The majority of songs they played were instrumentals, steady in their spare Ventures-style surfing. Electric guitarist Oleg “Guitaracula” Fomchenkov’s fingers served as the lead voice. They slid down the neck into lower-string heavy single-note runs. They flew into top-string interludes. They created single-strummed minor chords that they whammy-bar warped into monster-flick echoes. Bassist Svetlana “Zombierella” Nagaeva and the band’s drummer added accompaniment that anticipated Fomchenkov’s every pivot in tempo and intensity.
Occasionally Nagaeva would step to the mic to offer a line or two of dispassionate spoken lyrics, to which Fomchenkov, in constant roaming and dipping mode, would respond with a evenly-timed guitar lick, a booming sinister Dracula laugh, or, in one case, an eyes-closed snore from which he immediately sprang back up and resumed picking.
At other concerts the band has projected clips of retro zombie and monster flicks to drive home the point of the show. They didn’t do that at Cafe 9 and didn’t need to. My brain flashed to The Munsters theme song, of course. I also felt transported back to stripped-down intensity of Ron’s Place in its 1980 – 81 heyday. Most of all, though, the Messer Chups rode us along waves to the present, grateful that we could wander into a Crown Street club on a weekend night and into an intimate, up-close encounter with top-touring talent from across an ocean.
The musicians mostly stayed in camp horror-movie mode but couldn’t help succumbing to smiles from time to time. Because, like the bopping crowd, they were having too much fun to pretend otherwise.
Full performance on a stop earlier in this tour.