Recap Tim And Eric at Barrymore Theatre, The Dials and Mannequin Men at High Noon Saloon

The Barrymore Theatre hosted Friday night what could be the ultimate testament to the age of irony: Tim And Eric's Awesome Tour 2009. The performance was based on the duo’s Adult Swim sketch-comedy cult hit, Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, which itself is a love letter to terrible media. Satirizing cheesy job-training videos, public-access television, lousy sitcoms, and karaoke, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim generally prefer to recruit incompetent street performers and Z-list actors looking for work through Craigslist over using big-name celebrities. The tour arrived ahead of the TV show's upcoming fourth season (beginning Feb. 8). The stage set included two spotlights, a fog machine that could have been stolen from a 10-year-old's birthday party, and a giant projection screen. The duo jumped on stage wearing skin-tight gold unitards with exaggerated crotch bulges and opened with a six-minute opus entitled "Diarrhea."

When the one-word song finally ended, they awarded themselves with the "Dane County Award For Best Comedy Sketch In Madison," and Heidecker thanked his "Uncle Solomon" for designing the outfits. Between costume changes, producer DJ Douggpound played clips on his laptop from the forthcoming season, including advertisements for both "D-Pants," transparent pants designed for containing diarrhea, and a portable showerhead that hooks up to urinals. Next, the pair hit the stage dressed as clownish third-graders for a set of songs from the TV show's "Kid's Break" segment, rapping about adultery, bloody nipples, and sitting down to pee. Additionally, they played a pair of womanizing shrimp-and-white-wine loving, party boy caricatures called the Beaver Boys and recreated a domestic double homicide with an inflatable doll and R&B vocalist Sire for a bit called "Sexual Romance."

The true genius of the performance was in the alluring (if not depressing) lack of self-awareness displayed by laughably awful comedian James Quall and scruffy ventriloquist David Liebe Hart (who is incapable of “throwing his voice,” as ventriloquists call their trick, and in some cases, forgets when to switch between puppet-voice and his own). The audience roared as Quall, clad in a hideous black suit with leopard-print lapels, performed his obnoxious a cappella surf-rock number, "Beach Blast," then went into a horrific stand-up comedy set with too much pride for it to have been deliberately bad. The evening reached an absurd climax as Liebe Hart, wearing a blinking Bluetooth headset and an old windbreaker, cued up some chintzy backing tracks for a sloppy set of sing-a-longs about issues like staying in school, drinking milk, and being abducted by aliens.

Heidecker and Wareheim re-emerged in light-up neon green unitards and blue light-up sunglasses to close the show with a mock-infomercial titled "The Tim And Eric Touch," while Liebe Hart, Quall, and Sire dressed up as sweatsuit astronauts waving flags of Tim and Eric's faces. For an encore, the duo came out in matching bathrobes and invited a few audience members on stage for a quick game of Tim And Eric trivia, and thanked their fans for being "fucked up."

The Dials and Mannequin Men at High Noon Saloon
Local rock-club goers finally uncrossed their arms for a raucous night of danceable garage-rock at the High Noon later on, thanks to two of Chicago's sassiest and snottiest bands. After openers The Type and The 2 Plus 2, Mannequin Men's pop-infused trash-rock summoned a jarring collision of screeching feedback, gritty guitars, and crackling croons.

Opening with the drugged-up shuffle of "3 Wishes," singer Kevin Richard spat his Iggy-lite vocals over the growl of his Gibson SG, which clashed into the jangled Telecaster tones of Ethan D'Ercole. Underneath the messy guitar-hiss, the swaggering basslines of Miles Raymer, who also yelled back up vocals into Richard's microphone, batted in to the tasteful proto-punk rhythms of drummer and vocalist Seth Bohn. "Everything's gonna come out wrong!" Richard howled during "Private School," a filthy rocker that could have served as a B-side to The Stooges' "Gimme Danger." The set mixed songs from Mannequin Men’s 2007 release Fresh Rot with tunes from an untitled album that’s due out by summer. A skinny male in front, clad in a choker and black bondage shorts, hopped up and down excitedly without pause until the foursome joined their voices to close the set with a cover of The Pagans' "(Us &) All Our Friends Are So Messed Up."

The Dials, fresh off a recent tour of Japan, opened with a bouncy number entitled "Diablo," which seamlessly rolled into the angst-laden punk blast of "Sick Times." The quirky hiccup-laden vocals of vocalist/bassist Rebecca Crawford danced around the reflective angst of vocalist/guitarist/synth player Patti Gran as she stomped her feet and switched between spastic riffing, battered chords, and synthesizer melodies. Emily Dennison's blurry Farfisa playing latched sharp hooks into the provocative dance-rock of "18," which bled straight into the decadent groove of "Flex Time." Drummer Chad Romanski kept the audience bopping along for the whole set, which even got the audience screaming for an encore. The exhausted quartet met the crowd's demands, squeezing out "Take It To The Man" and “Bye Bye Bye Bye Baby,” two more ferocious numbers that also proved inadvertently adorable.