Photo: Tyler Curtis, darkroomdemons.com

I’m a sucker for any of the following rock rarities:

1) A drummer who stands.
2) A drummer who sings lead.
3) A female drummer.

A confluence of all three made Yeah Yeah Yeahs opener Grand Ole Party an even rarer rock occurence: a rather unknown and fantastic opener winning over a massive crowd. Standing singer-drummer Kristin Gundred fronts the San Diego garage trio, bashing a tom with a tambourine stick and working a kick petal with her shoeless black stocking–covered foot while wailing like Grace Slick and, well, Karen O. Regular dude John Paul Labno tersely plucked out chicken-scratch rhythm & blues riffs while bassist Michael Krechnyak raided the Rutles’ closet, thumbing fat fuzz while wearing an Indian-style dress shirt and heeled loafers.

Gundred suffered and chuckled through some comical mic stand issues, but the capacity crowd cheered after each number. The band has one album to date, Humanimals, but the best numbers of the night—lovely soul-pop tunes about love and death—came from an upcoming Fall LP. Ripped CDs with a couple of new tracks were free at the merch table, and I spotted dozens of folks snatching them up.

After 30 mins of a guitar tech checking Nick Zinner’s dozen-plus effects pedals, Yeah Yeah Yeahs took the stage to screams and cheers. No review would be complete without a style recap of Karen O, so here it goes:

• Yellow and brown tiger print tights.
• White jumper with red and blue neo-Korean abstract eyeball print.
• Matching, detachable furisode sleeves and looping loincloth.
• Accessorizing horse collar and draping arm-tubes.
• Pink Mexican wrestling mask with a neon face spiral.

In short, she was fabulous and mesmerizing.

After opening with the slowly-building and beautiful “Runaway” (which some might spot from Gossip Girl. No? Just me?), the band kicked into first album cut “Black Tongue.” O stomped on confetti machines, which spewed glittering red Ys into the crowd. Sweaty revelers stuck them to their face. Confetti returned later, in the set climax of “Zero.” (YYYs are big into little scraps of paper these days. Check out their new Mighty Boosh–directed video for “Heads Will Roll” above—a little bit “Smooth Criminal,” a little bit “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah”).

Photo: Tyler Curtis, darkroomdemons.com

O pranced and tai-chi’ed around the stage, as the group worked through songs from each album (though, I was a tiny bit bummed to not hear “Down Boy,” or anything else, from the Is Is EP), throwing in a Cramps cover (”Human Fly”) and ancient Touch & Go era track (”Art Star”). During the later, O shoved the mic in her mouth and bent over backwards, shoulders hitting the floor, screaming her throat out. All that back-to-back with adorable synth-pop hits from It’s Blitz!

Drummer Brian Chase, who I still swear is a dead ringer for Max Weinberg, smiled ear to ear throughout, swinging his drumsticks like a jazz kid gone punk, and Zinner pouted and swished while beating out black chunks of noise and shrill guitar scribbles. Bench player David Pajo, of Slint and Zwan, added bass, keyboard or acoustic guitar here and there, but sat many songs out. That’s okay, I suspect they dragged him along mostly to hear him play his wonderfully downer Misfits covers before each show. A thrilled crowd, an animated gonzo band—as Chucks-gazing indie rock crawls further into a flannel-lined tin can, it was refreshing to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs go—to quote Glenn Danzig—where eagles dare. Ride, Karen, ride.