Hogpig, Swedish Teens

These days, I can't walk into a music venue without bumping into a roller derby fund-raiser, and I couldn't be happier about it. Sure, I dig the eye candy, but more important, the rock-loving, roller-skate-wearing chicks indirectly help me with a weird rating system: A band's quality is proportional to how much I ignore women dancing next to me. By that criterion, Hogpig kicks all asses, as I was too busy rocking out on Saturday to notice derby girls in the Double Wide crowd. The Denton four-piece sounded like graduates of a classic-rock graduate school, as their calculated, double-guitar blasts seemed as ready for the Gypsy Tea Room as a monster truck jam. Eight-minute epic "Hammer of the Mods" jumped from a cranked-up Skynyrd riff to a wily solo to an ending that sounded like a Heart song re-recorded by Slayer, and "Divebomb" twisted and turned through unrelenting drums while Ian Johnson sang, "This song's a metaphor/For fuck you, we're up in your shit!" Above all, Hogpig's beer-soaked sense of humor, capped off by a song that repeated the lyric "Fuck you, Mike Love," spurred even the snobbiest listeners to throw up the devil horns.

Fellow Dentonites Swedish Teens headlined, and when derby girls approached the stage dressed as sailors, the attire fit. That's because the punk rock trio sounded disgustingly like Norwegian camp-rockers Turbonegro, who are notorious for dressing like sailors in concert, but the local version paled in comparison. The Teens' songs got the crowd shaking, but wimpy drumming, boring lyrics and the timid singing of Klas Josephson, who disappointed in both his screams and his attempts at balladry, made my attention drift back to the derby girls. The ladies started slam-dancing with each other, and for that, I thank the Swedish Teens.