Sightings

Your average rock outfit peppers its catchy rapture with gnarly rupture. The grisly no-wave of NYC trio Sightings, on the other hand, is almost all disorienting, volcanic rupture: a post-atomic tangle of instrumentation and seething vocal fury. Sometimes Jonathan Lockie, Mark Morgan, and Richard Hoffman sound like jaws-of-life apparatuses ripping apart crashed cars; sometimes they sound like crippled Transformers bashing broken appendages together in a desperate stab at Morse Code; sometimes their noise is almost suspiciously minimalist (see 2004's Arrived in Gold). Admittedly, on last year's Andrew W.K.-produced Through the Panama, Sightings held their extremist tendencies at bay in an effort to green the scorched-to-the-roots garden they tend. But even with much of the scraping, jutting noise stripped away, Sightings remain too uncompromising for prime time and perfect for an underground that thrives on inscrutable, convoluted confusion and that sweet, sweet rupture. With Gay Witch Abortion.
Thu., March 20, 9 p.m., 2008