Review: The Aristocrats, Bierkeller

When The Aristocrats played Bristol last year, a show of hands revealed that 80% of the audience were musos. This time, Bryan Beller set out to further define the appeal of the trio’s self-styled “peculiar instrumental music”, putting to the test his theory that 99% of those present were “sweaty men”. Our perspiration status went unchecked, but his proposed all-female singalong was greeted with . . . absolute silence, followed by loud manly guffaws from the assembled sausagefest. Case proven, m’lud.

It goes without saying that these guys are fearsomely brilliant musicians, whose chief contribution to global harmony is to persuade any of us tempted to pick up a musical instrument that we should put it right back down again immediately. German-born drummer Marco Minnemann and American bassist Beller are members of famously exacting Joe Satriani’s band. Minnemann also plays alongside Brit guitarist Guthrie Govan with Steven Wilson. These rent-paying gigs require flawless musicianship and a certain amount of on-stage anonymity. The Aristocrats, whose complex instrumentals are compiled by email across continents in the trio’s downtime, gives them the opportunity to let their hair down and have some fun, unencumbered by artificial musical boundaries. Indeed, the stereotype of the brow-furrowingly intense muso widdling away furiously in front of a solemnly reverential audience could not be further from reality.

In a set mostly drawn from ZZ Top-referencing new album Tres Caballeros, each instrumental is preceded by a lengthy explanatory introduction by the band member responsible for its composition, these droll tales ranging from Beller’s encounter with a deranged woman who accused him of running over her car (Texas Crazypants) to Govan’s fascination with convoluted theories put forward to explain a puzzling Fortean event (The Kentucky Meat Shower). Their musical telepathy makes it all seem so effortless as they meld jazz, twangsome country, prog-fusion, heavy metal and, ahem, squeaky toy pigs (“my rubbery prop”, explains Govan) in a way that can best be described as Zappa-esque. Even Minnemann’s lengthy drum solo during Desert Tornado is right up there with Neil Peart’s Buddy Rich-inspired workouts as a rare example of the form that doesn’t prompt a mass piss break. Among the many standouts are the fiendishly complex, Ren & Stimpy-inspired supercharged New Orleans jazz of Louisville Stomp, the rather lovely Pressure Relief (during which Minnemann plays drums with his left hand and keyboards with his right – how is this even possible?), and epic encore Get it Like That, which fully delivers on the promise to build from a gentle opening to a full-on heavy metal inferno.

After more than two hours of this jaw-dropping stuff, the blokey Bierkeller exodus sends suitably sated chaps out into the night, and presumably back into the arms of their long-suffering loved ones, still chattering excitedly about unusual time signatures and the like.