Recap The Onion's 5 LBs Of Christmas party with Decibully, John The Savage, and Quinn Scharber And The...

The Onion’s 5 LBs Of Christmas show Saturday at BBC featured an intriguing bill of popular local bands that don’t often play together: Decibully, John The Savage, and Quinn Scharber And The... So, while Decider would normally be drinking heavily and enjoying the embarrassing antics of our Onion co-workers at the company Christmas party, we stayed sober-ish this year for the sake of Milwaukee rock ‘n’ roll.

The night started out with Quinn Scharber, a lanky Paul Westerberg devotee who walked on stage carrying a gorgeous, cherry red Rickenbacker guitar, looking every bit the self-respecting Midwestern power-popper. The name of Scharber’s backing group changes with every gig, and at BBC it was going by “The 5 LBs Of Lube,” a moniker they really ought to consider keeping. As on the 2008 release Being Nice Won’t Save Milwaukee, Scharber and company banged out no-frills, melodic pop rock with an unapologetic bar band sensibility. If anything, Scharber could stand a frill or two, lest his music slip into the workman-like anonymity of an actual bar band. But anyone who loves the tambourine as much as Scharber is guaranteed to score copious likeability points. And this man loves the tambourine. He apparently carries a chest full of them, because he handed out a bunch to audience members (including Mark Waldoch of The Celebrated Workingman) while covering Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark.” Scharber actually bested The Boss in one respect at least: A tambourine orchestra beats dancing with Courtney Cox any day.

Next up was John The Savage, a strange, carnivalesque sevenpiece that’s emerged as one of the city’s most-talked about live acts. It’s not hard to understand why: John The Savage conforms to the recent local trend of “exotic” instrumentation—meaning trumpets, cellos, and anything else more associated with high school music programs than rock bands—while sounding unlike any other group band in town, mainly because of Michael Skorcz’s eccentric, love-’em-or-hate-’em vocals. Skorcz’s circus barker growl fits the cinematic sweep of the music, which veers impressively from New Orleans funeral marches to James Brown funk grooves, but it also sounds awkward and contrived a lot of the time. He’s better off toning down his overbearing Tom Waits impression (which he did on the deathly oom-pah number “Oh, Alexandra!”) or letting the band’s woozy ensemble take center stage, like on the rousing Ennio Morricone knock-off “Me & The Warden: Standoff,” a highlight of this year’s Kitchen Voodoo.

While John The Savage’s set was a hit-or-miss affair, the energetic group might have been a more appropriate closer than the night’s mellower headliner, Decibully, a band whose slavish attention to aural minutia suits them well in the studio but not always in sweaty, smoky bars. Much of Decibully’s set was drawn from the new, still unreleased World Travels Fast, which the band pored over for more than two years. You can hear all that painstaking work in the immaculately recorded songs, which sound so clean you could probably perform surgery on them. (Listen to them here.) World Travels Fast is built for headphones, and hearing the songs live made your ass yearn for the plush red seats of the Pabst Theater, a more appropriate venue for the sophisticated 21st century indie pop Decibully now specializes in. At BBC, Decibully struggled at times with the less-than-ideal environment. The watery sonics of “Live By The Lake,” for instance, were swallowed up by the after-midnight barroom vibe, which called out for something grittier and more muscular. But good songs are good songs, and Decibully delivered one after another during its hour-long set, including a dynamite cover of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” that rang out as joyously as the beer bottles clinking from tables of happy holiday revelers.