Recap These Are Powers at Corral Room

The Corral Room isn't an ideal place to throw a show; it’s tiny, the urinal in the men’s bathroom is constantly broken, and the P.A. could turn Bette Midler’s vocals into a series of muffled goose-honks. Though, when upstart local promoter Wongz Walk gave away free Colt 45s all night, while putting on an eclectic bill headlined by DJ Diamonds and Brooklynite no-wavers These Are Powers, the Corral Room somehow morphed into the perfect setting for an animalistic dance party. After Appleton’s All Creatures (not to be confused with Madison’s All Tiny Creatures) kicked things off with a wobbly set of synth-punk, a Green Bay rapper by the name of Yolks took the stage with an egg-cellent set of swaggering hip-hop a la Young Jeezy. (See what we did there?)

From the opening boasts of “I’m Yolks,” the young rapper had most of the crowd dancing sloppily around him for the entirety of his set as he spat his ultra-tight flow over the well-produced Southern-rap beats that inevitably came farting out of the cheap speakers. The shitty P.A. certainly didn’t take away from Yolks’ confidence, or his ability to dominate the audience with ease. After Yolks wrapped up his short set, an impressive new Madison duo called Inyan Kara (featuring local noise musician Beau Devereaux, who also performs and records as Anvil Dome) made its local debut.

The set kicked off with drummer-guitarist Casey Marnocha looping some textural guitar ripples with a pedal (which he would continually operate with his left foot while beating the shit out of his drums), setting the axe down, and clicking the duo into pummeling, scattershot chaos. Devereaux wailed away on his fuzzed-out bass guitar while Marnocha hammered out his beastly polyrhythms underneath. During a particularly memorable tune, Devereaux plugged into a radio receiver, twisting knobs to shape a giant wall of white noise before the twosome pummeled into more groove-oriented madness, sending the sweaty audience into fits. When IK finished up, Madison’s Ca$h Dawg played an obnoxiously loud set of noise-punk for about 10 minutes, and then These Are Powers took the floor with a discordant set of hip-hop-inspired post-punk.

As the band opened with atonal thump of “Double Double Yolk,” the sassy vocals of Anna Barie (which ran through a whammy guitar pedal) soared over the outsider hip-hop beats of electro-acoustic drummer Bill Salas, who also had a huge arsenal of guitar pedals and a couple of samplers at his disposal. Bassist Pat Noecker (formerly of Liars) hammered away at his customized bass, which was being run through two giant pedal boards. The crowd's energy hit a peak during the clap along to “Easy Answers,” as the audience jerked arrhythmically to TAP’s sonic twitching.

The trio’s set pulled largely from 2008’s All Aboard Future, even pulling out such new tunes as “Sugarman” and “New Era.” Barie kept busy throughout the set, constantly twirling knobs, hitting pedals, and triggering samples while dancing like a fish out of water. The set hit its climax during the energetic blast of “Life Of Birds,” before the band fizzled out with a final dance-a-thon in the form of “World Class Peoples.”