Marshall Crenshaw & Los Straitjackets
Marshall Crenshaw & Los Straitjackets combines the shared sensibilities of a pop-rock maestro and a band of guitar-wielding masked marauders.
Though best known for his 1982 hit “Someday, Someway” (or perhaps his role in 1987’s La Bamba as Buddy Holly, to whom he’s often compared), Crenshaw resurfaces every few years with a new studio album or EP that never fails to earn superlatives, if not money. Many feel his best work is done on the concert stage; several well-circulated live albums, spanning multiple phases of his career, would seem to bolster that assertion.
The lucha libre–masked Los Straitjackets have been around since the late ’80s (other than a brief early-’90s hiatus), though only guitarists Danny Amis and Eddie Angel remain from the original incarnation. Old dudes remember their Christmas-music performances on Conan O’Brien’s TV show, and cult-movie fans love their songs and appearance in the 2000 horror spoof Psycho Beach Party. It’ll be interesting to see how Crenshaw’s mildly sardonic pop rock meshes with the psychotic stage antics of the Straitjackets — what sort of show you get when you mix Prairie Home Companion with a Mexican Kiss concert.