All day yesterday I told people what an amazing show I had seen the previous evening at Gabe’s: the March Fourth Marching Band.

“What were they like, Yale?”

And that was the problem. I couldn’t say what they were “like” because they were so damn unique. I’d never seen anything “like” them ever before in all my years of going to concerts or seeing marching bands perform at football games or parades.

I had to describe them then for what they are, not what they were “like.”

What they are is a band so butch they make the Village People seem like N.W.A. by comparison, but with no tongues in cheeks at all – they mean it.

I think Salvador Dali is their manager.

They buy mustache wax by the drum.

H.R. Geiger designed their drum kits.

After seeing their show I am now sexually attracted to hats.

The space was not big enough for them and the sound and spectacle they brought with them and neither was my brain, it’s still throbbing. (Though that may also be the energy drink-based cocktails I had, lesson learned.)

I wanted to steal their poster from the door of the bar and crawl inside it in live there with the red-headed gal featured on it.

Their show was an Alejandro Jodorowsky film that jumped off the screen only with fewer exploding bullfrogs.

Some mad scientist somewhere took a marching band that died in a bus crash outside his castle, reassembled the bodies, laid them out on a platform that he pulled to the ceiling where it was zapped with a lightning bolt and brought them back to life as a monster, cackling all the time as he admired his creation, a monster of a sort that had never existed before.

A sweaty, beautiful, chaotic, organized, hyper-realized, super tight, fever dream of a monster that defies categorization and pumped out so much beat and rhythm that Gabe’s better call in a structural engineer to look at their roof sometime soon because it may have been blown clean the fuck off.

This was their first show in Iowa City and we all gushed and pleaded and threatened them that they better come back – or else – and I certainly hope they do.

Mostly for the sake of everybody who didn’t get to see them this time and are – rightfully – feeling bad about it given how much those of us that did have talked them up.

Would I go see them again myself?

I don’t know. They set the bar pretty insanely damn high themselves with their show on Monday and how could they possibly top it?

Then again, if anybody could, it would be them, wouldn’t it?

That’s a chance I’m willing to take.

If we’re lucky enough for them to come to our town again, so should you.