Lincoln Hall is, hands down, the weirdest concert venue I’ve ever set foot in.

And I’ve been to The Fireside Bowl.

I made my L.H. debut last Wednesday night for Thee Oh Sees, a garage pop outfit from San Francisco, about whom my roommate had said, “I think I’ve heard they’re pretty much pretty good.”

They were just so.

Lincoln Hall, too, was a pretty much pretty good place to see music performed. Opened in 2009 by the owners of Southport Ave.’s Schuba’s, L.H. is the renovated Fullerton Theatre of 1912, which most recently housed the 3 Penny Cinema. It’s on Lincoln, just north of Fullerton in Lincoln Park. The venue feels like it’s on Lincoln, just north of Fullerton in Lincoln Park. Which is not a bad thing, exactly, but it makes seeing punk performed there a little weird.

It was almost too nice a venue.

First things first: I headed for the men’s room – little did I know that I’d be micturating in the most pristine bathroom that a music venue about to put on a punk-ish show has ever presented to the world. It was . . . weird. The urinals themselves, for instance, were shaped like 1960’s mod chairs, the shape and color of massive eggs inset into the wall, with each egg missing what could only be termed its front hatch. Why would you make a urinal look this way?

Furthermore, and perhaps more noteworthy - there was not a drop of graffiti in the joint. Not one mark in the bathroom of a concert venue. Not an exploded pens worth of hieroglyphics. Zilch. Nada. There were some flyers put up on the door, but they were arranged tastefully in columns and rows, all of them advertising the upcoming Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s show (Sept. 19). Conspicuously, nobody had torn any of the flyers down, nor desecrated them with blasphemy, awful song lyrics, or phone numbers and the reasons one might be prevailed upon to call them. It was pure Twilight Zone, I tell you. I got out of there as soon as I could.

Lincoln Hall is divided into two sections: there’s an antechamber with tall circular tables set on crane legs resting under soft lighting. There's full bar featuring two smiling bartenders and a kitchen lurks somewhere nearby because there are lots of food scraps left on the tall tables. And then there’s the second room: the stage room. The stage room’s walls are exposed brick until they meet intricate metalwork that spins and curls up to the stage room bar, a bar with plenty of on-tap beer options and built-in wood-paneled shelves that hold bottles of expensive-looking liquor, each bottle backlit by a little light fixture in a way that renders the bottle’s contents into highly desirable shades of gold.

Let it be known that I’m not trying to paint L.H. in hoity-toity pen-strokes. I don’t actually think it is very pretentious or haughty, and I think that most people who might claim to feel that way are simply reacting to the unexpected. L.H. is actually quite warm, both temperature-wise and in the feelings it evokes. Unzipping my hooded sweatshirt, I took in a crowd of mostly thirty-something alternative types dressed in plaid shirts and tight to semi-tight jeans or Dockers. Almost everybody drank beer either out of plastic cups or glasses, chatting amicably in clusters, apologizing when they bumped into one another during a particularly demonstrative retelling of a story. It’s a warm place that just happens to be nice.

The first band of the evening is Paul Cary. I think. They never actually say their name, and they’re a three-piece group, Possibly Paul Cary is - guitar-keys-drums - with a lead singer/guitar player whose gravelly vocals crack in all the right places as it's transmitted through old-school ribbon microphone effects. P.P.C.’s sound is bluesy and melodic, like a more melancholy version of some The Strokes’s songs. The keyboard sounds good when you can hear it, which isn’t often enough. The lead singer (possibly Paul Cary himself?) should annunciate better. I caught maybe every third word. And the guitar playing trends towards the simple - especially the solos, which were not understated so much as casual, and far from the blues-driven self-expression I’d been hoping to hear.

Up next is Hot Machines, who thankfully identify themselves as such. They’re a really fun band, a jump-around squawking punk band that’s mostly upbeat. They employ both a male and a female singer, and Hot Machines are at their best when the two of them overlap voices, the melodies and arpeggios commingling, her chirps bisecting his microphone-effected crooning. The lady singer, Miss Alex-White (according to MySpace), has a great, rangy voice that’s smoky and seductive on their one slower song, and I wish we could have heard her full range more often. As it was, she stuck mostly to chirping. She also has great, massive hair, billowing curly hair that’s red or gold or American cheese yellow, often all three shades in one song when the stage lighting flickers back and forth across the color spectrum. Like this evening’s openers, Hot Machines are largely indecipherable. I believe I heard not infrequently the words, “Fire” and “Go,” but can offer little more than that in regard to their lyrical selections. And I was listening. My lamentations about understanding words might make me come off like a hearing aid-straddling octogenarian, but, man, let me at least a little bit into what you’re trying to do lyrically. Slurring ninety-five percent of its lyrics makes a band sound insecure, not indifferent. Likewise, like a lot of punk bands, Hot Machines are musically repetitive. After twenty minutes it all starts to blend together, I think, feeling again like an out of touch old-person, though I might be the youngest guy here. Music should take risks, and surely Hot Machines took one in their determination to play this music of fire and go, but the risks seem to have faltered there, confined to choices of style and tone instead of exotic instrumentation. Deviate and be rewarded. As is, however, they’re still barrels of fun.

Thee Oh Sees go on last. They’re a San Francisco outfit once known as Orange County Sound, which doesn’t make too much geographical sense, but who knows? Live music can be wonderful because just when you’ve fallen in love with an opening act, when you’ve determined that they’ve got a great sound, decided that they should go places far and wide, the headliner comes on and reminds everybody in attendance about how inventive, poppy music can really sound. The headliner tells us what it’s like to own true showmanship; they let us see for certain how a band’s cleverly crafted dynamic can play out on stage before our very eyes. Thee Oh Sees perform twangy, slippery punk songs with surfeit energy and verve. They craft catchy melodies to be sung over by lead singer John Dwyer, whose stage presence is phenomenal. He whirls around and kicks his legs, dancing, holding his guitar high on his chest like a machinegun or placing it headstock down on the ground while drummer Mike Shoun unleashes a vicious, five-minute drum solo. Dwyer has so much life in him that he cannot help but end nearly every poppy line with a “Whoop!” or a “Yip!” and by the end of the night those whoops and yips feel trademarked to him and to him alone, and I will think of Thee Oh Sees when I hear a dog yip or a crane whoop for a long time to come. Dwyer has so much stage presence that half the time it feels like he is up there performing by himself while the eyes of his comparatively humdrum band mates follow him around, distractedly playing their instruments, taking in the show as an on-stage audience.

Thee Oh Sees’ sound is hard to describe with anything approaching a realized fullness, but that’s because they’re originals. There are traces of Devo in the melodies, I suppose, and particles of surf rock, too. When Dwyer solos it sounds like he’s improvising, and he might be, taking off whole bars at a time between notes, then returning with a flurry up the guitar neck and back down it again before rediscovering the melody. The solos, and virtually everything about Thee Oh Sees, feels patient, in spite of their fast tempo. Patience welded to experimentation sounds like inspiration, even if its all been hashed out ahead of time. They just sound alive - eagerly alive – playing the same three chords in every charming song.

On my weirdest nights, it is nice to know that I have, at least, been charmed.

http://www.myspace.com/ohsees

http://www.myspace.com/hotmachines

http://www.lincolnhallchicago.com/