THE STEVEN McDONALD GROUP
at Spaceland, April 13

Perhaps Steven McDonald is too modest. He humbly sees himself as playing Carl Wilson to his older brother Jeff's Brian ("Jeff's the genius," he says), and he generally deferred to Jeff when they collaborated in the manic, over-the-top glitter-pop-punk spectacle that was Redd Kross. Steven's hair-tossing artistry, psychedelic bass paddings and occasional lead-vocal turns in the Kross (and in fraternal side projects like the wacky Yoko/Beatles homage Tater Totz and the reductivist hardcore parody Anarchy 6) revealed that he had plenty of star power -- enough, in fact, to draw a capacity crowd for his long-awaited bandleader debut.

"I'm somewhere between Che Guevara and Belinda Carlisle as a front person," he said in a recent phone interview. "Not enough lead singers are go-go dancing now." Backed by a quartet of sympathetically powerful unknowns at Spaceland, McDonald was free to shake his booty and his tambourine, sometimes switching to bass or pecking a little at the keyboards. And the little girls (still) understand: A knot of not necessarily young women at the side of the stage squealed unselfconsciously throughout the set like Beatlemaniacs.

Even as he emerged from Jeff's shadow with a brace of catchy, irony-free new songs -- built on groovy "Taxman"-like, octave-tolling bass riffs and melodic keening shrouded in Nirvanaesque layers of distortion -- Steven acknowledged his brother's influence and his old band's legacy directly. The SMG opened with "Frosted Flake" and rumbled through three other Redd Kross tunes, including the wistful hot-rod fantasy "SoCal V8." At one point, Steven, who seemed genuinely surprised by the crowd's affection, confessed that he was probably talking too much between songs, adding that Jeff had warned him "to keep the mystery." The band mysteriously and mystically closed the show with a giddy reclamation of Stone Temple Pilots' Redd Kross sound-alike "Big Bang Baby," which McDonald introduced as "me channeling Scott Weiland channeling my brother."

– Falling James/printed in the LA Weekly/photo by Leilani

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