Last nights Chromeo bash at Circa28 got off to a slow start, the bottom floor getting tighter and tighter while they waited an eternity to open the top floor. Luckily, we arrived about five minutes before the cutoff time for free admission. Some Snap!/”Party All the Time”/Dee-Lite typea jams were mixed together, apparently while wearing rubber mittens as both hipster and random weirdo body counts began to rise. Those two girls arrived fairly early, so at least someone was dancing. You know the two.

Luckily, insanity arrived early in the form of a red-haired girl wearing a home-made outfit that was not some much tasteless as beyond taste. As she and her polymorphous pervert friend set up their gear, Ross went over to take a shot and ask what we should expect.

“Some crazy shit.”

Truth in advertising, my friend. Finesse & Runway is the name, and they are in fact some crazy shit. My ears immediately perked up as I purchased the second and last drink of the evening (at $6 for a beer, we were paying about half of what the customary price would be later on), hearing heavy bursts of glam, synthpop and noise firing up together from the corner.

Finesse & Runway are a total performance act, quite down-to-earth and almost businesslike offstage. Onstage, it’s constant explosion time- drum machine and pedal-driven loops provide a constant whirring psychedelic casio tone poem imbued with the spirit of freestyle, Soft Cell, cabaret, Black Sabbath, stoner rock, Ween, avante-garde and disco-pop. Meanwhile, both Dino
“Runway” Felipe (pictured above) and Melba “Finesse” Payes (pictured below) sing and play hand percussion- maraca and tambourine, respectively. And they both move. And not just hips, like with yer indie rockers. These people use their whole bodies. Living-room brawls, private cigarette soliloquoys and teenage girls singing along to Debbie Deb are suggested and just as quickly discarded as Finesse & Runway not so much perform as take over a corner of a club in order to assault you with a panorama of youth culture mashed up, cropped, screwed, whatever. So like, performance art with wack-ass awesome beats.

Whatever it was, it sounded completely new, leaving me feeling like I’d seen an early Stooges show or the like. But apparently, they’ve a three-year old album out, which we’re on the hunt for today. There’s also a decent interview here.

Figuring nothing else we’d hear there could top this, we headed downtown…