February 26 2003

'YOU'RE SO PALE !" a fan loudly said to Jessie Trashed at the Bottom of the Hill Feb. 9. The comment was funny not because the Vanishing's vocalist did look ghost white, but because the fan looked like she sees even less sunlight than Trashed does. Not that anyone in the room owned a tanning salon membership: aptly self-described "horror disco" trio the Vanishing are San Francisco's premier goth-punk band, and it seemed safe to assume everyone who'd ventured out was ready to revel in the starker, darker side of life.

First, though, openers Babyland provided a different sort of house of horrors. With the duo nailing the early '90s industrial sound that made Trent Reznor famous, their crowd's gung-ho goth quotient was, predictably, nothing to sneeze at – especially with all of those pierced septa! Amid the blood red lipstick, eyeliner, and black hair dye that turned the pogo pit into a sea of Crow-style clichés, one of the few blondies in attendance got my vote for smartest accessory of darkness: a Batman T-shirt that perfectly captured the comical, caricatured brooding onstage.

Once Babyland – and half of the audience – departed, however, a real sense of gothic ambience emerged. With vertigo-inducing swirls and silent-film scenes flashing behind them, the white-and-black-clad Vanishing launched into "Paralyzed," a drums-and-keys number featuring Trashed's seriously impressive limbs-akimbo dancing. And when her vocal delay turned the club into an echo chamber of Banshees screams, the whole thing seemed, fittingly, less like a rock show than like a highly dramatic reenactment of an exorcism.

It's not surprising that the Vanishing, cut from the same black cloth as the Lies and Subtonix, have a finely honed sense of the macabre. What is notable: the guitar-free trio (vocalist-bassist-saxophonist Trashed, drummer Brian Hock, and Sadie Shaw's keyboard replacement, Billy Bates) more than live up to the reps of those bands. With such an exhilarating, synth-driven sound and visual stage show, the Vanishing can't be written off as just goths. They remind me of, among other things, the Faint, Fritz Lang's M, Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre, the Charm soundtrack, Adult.'s Nicola Kuperus, New York's early-'80s no wave scene, Joy Division, and the hottie in my neighborhood whose raccoon eyes are the least Siouxie-inspired things about him. Mostly, though, I just wanna dance.

Featuring none of the material on the band's In the Bat Haus EP (Cochon Records), the band's 30-minute, six-song set previewed Songs for Psychotic Children, their full-length debut, recorded by Tim Green for Gold Standards Laboratories. And while Bat Haus is a fine intro to the Vanishing, the new songs are by far the band's best and disco-est work yet. Along with "Paralyzed," "White Walls," and a still-untitled instrumental, the show included a cover of Tuxedo Moon's "In the Name of Talent," and "Teenage Whore" – not, thankfully, a cover of Hole's sludgy, slut-pride song – wherein Trashed's saxophone playing put the Vanishing somewhere near the top of the "Best Pro-Sax Punks Since X-Ray Spex" list.