Playbill

Bobby Conn

Hey, mathlete, figure this one out: Queen + Bowie + The Rocky Horror Picture Show = ?

Electric Eel Shock

The Bravery

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Time’s up, put down your pencils. You guessed Bobby Conn. Damn, so close, but wrong. An equation that equals Conn would also have been divided by violin, multiplied by a fistful of psychedelics, and added to a pair of nut-hugging stretch pants...all to the power of two, of course. With songs about whores, private country clubs, gun control, the capitalist system and the United Nations, Conn is able to masterfully walk a fine line between drenching his music in decadent excess and teaching his hypnotized audience a lesson. His stage persona — part outlandishly oversexed deviant, part rock and roll high priest — runs dangerously close at times to being performance art, but huge sonic ripping riffs catapult him from the pit of sucking joke into a stratosphere of “Holy fuck!” — Brian McManus Wednesday, March 16, at the Proletariat, 903 Richmond, 713-523-1199.

Oxes, with Enon

Oxes hail (appropriately) from the south side of that John Waters mecca of weird, Baltimore, where their tight, continually changing math riffs teeter on the edge of a mountain pass made of metal. They’ve fallen victim to a dubious distinction of Courtney Lovian proportions over the years, in that they’re known as much (if not more) for news-making antics than for their complex music. Their infamous XXX album cover out a couple of years ago depicted the threesome receiving fellatio and snorting the devil’s dandruff and was pulled off record store shelves. Wireless rigs and no vocal mikes allow them to roam through unsuspecting crowds as they play — that is, when they’re not standing on two-foot-high specially crafted black boxes that raise them above the stage like prophets of rock in an Andy Kaufman wet dream. — Brian McManus Tuesday, March 15, at Mary Jane’s Fat Cat, 4216 Washington, 713-869-5263.