Review: The Mermen Surfed into Space at Moe's Alley Saturday

If Jimi Hendrix were alive, he'd be proud of Mermen guitarist Jim Thomas.

Saturday night in front of about 150 people at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz, Thomas and the Mermen stunned the crowd with a three-hour set of psychedelic – dare I say – surf songs that passed like they went by in a minute.

Thomas who named his band for a line in a Hendrix song on the Electric Ladyland disc (1983, a Merman I will be), plays like he's channeling Jimi, with some Neil Young and Frank Zappa thrown into the mix. His skill is in his restlessness. He sounds like 16 people up there because he rarely plays the same 12 bars the same way twice and he changes tones and tempos so fast, it often seems impossible that there are only three people up there.

One line sounds like a gospel chorus, the next, like a needle piercing flesh, then there's a chunky riff like catching a perfect wave and another flying off into space. All these feelings sometimes change over seconds, like a TV remote in the hands of a kid with severe ADD.

Maybe that's why Thomas isn't a household name. It takes some serious concentration to keep up. This is music you can listen to – or dance to, as the hoola hoop people in the courtyard showed – but it's not easy-listening and it doesn't have vocals, which likely frustrates some.

To call these surf songs is confusing. Surf songs, like punk songs, are quick, repititious, and to my ears, boring in anything more than small doses. Thomas's songs celebrate the ocean and nature in all its complexity, summoning up feelings of orchestral movements or prog rock. At its softest, the tunes can almost pass for New Age, but at full volume, they are experimental, trippy, spacy, jam band sounds.

Saturday the band showed it has the guitar hero goods, and as if to prove it, Mermen bassist, Allen Whitman is about to leave for a tour with Joe Satriani, a guitar wanker at the top of the game with plenty of fame, but tunes that aren't nearly as evocative as the Mermen's. Drummer Martyn Jones is also phenomenal, holding it together and pushing these thick, deep, rich, orchestral passages along like he's driving a Caterpiller.

The best thing about Saturday's set was that they drew from the more spacy and melodic songs in their catalog, such as the almost Hendrixianly haunting "With No Definite Future and No Purpose Other Than To Prevail Somehow," from the album A Glorious Lethal Euphoria. They also threw in two unlikely and beautiful Christmas songs, including John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" and "Carol of the Bells." (see the videos to the right..sorry about Android sound quality. If you have a better one, pop it up here.).

The Mermen stretched songs out, some as long as 20 minutes, something else the box store buying public doesn't really support. This is a boutique band, many of whose songs should reach a broader audience. For 10 years they were the house band at Burning Man until they got burned out with that, but they have managed to keep off the radar of popular music, but not because of lack of talent or songs.

I first saw them in the '90s in  Austin, TX, at the South by Southwest music conference, not knowing they were a Santa Cruz band and figuring they were bound for the big stardom every musician dreams of. Little did I know then the injustices of the music business.

Guitarist Thomas is still at it, producing movie and video game soundtracks at his studio on 41st Avenue, including music for Sony Playstation's Road Rash 3D and a scientific ocean film show daily at the California Academy of Sciences at Golden Gate Park.

His songs are the exclusive soundtrack to the televised showings of the Mavericks surf contest. If I had to pick the most underrated artists playing today, they would be toward the top of the list.

They really should be better known, but for now, they are largely a part of the Santa Cruz fabric and we are lucky to have them.