Photos: Fever the Ghost, Fartbarf and Harriet Brown at the Echo

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Fever the Ghost

If nothing else, Fever the Ghost’s headlining show Friday night at the Echo made a compelling argument against any notion that the scene is populated by samey sound-alikes.

||| Photos by Zane Roessell

The weird, wonderful proceedings were kicked off by Harriet Brown (“the Asian Prince,” as he is becoming known), falsetto-ing over backing tracks and playing new songs and ones from his “New Era” EP. He yielded to Fartbarf, who, once you’re done cringing from typing their name, are a lot of fun. Here the party-hungry crowd got cop uniforms, grisly masks and four-on-the-floor, vocoded synth-rock, none of it particularly memorable but perfect for a Friday night moment. Wild dancing ensued. In a battle of the bands with Yeti rockers PPL MVR, our money’s on Fartbarf.

Then came the Flaming Lips-approved headliners, whose set was not for the faint of heart or sensitive of hearing. Or, for that matter, was it suitable for those needing traditional song structures.

Fever the Ghost announced last week that their debut full-length “Zirconium Meconium” would be out Sept. 25, and they arrived back in L.A. after a long tour to find that their new stage wear, designed by Michelle Rose of Echo Park’s Spacedust, were ready, along with neon silkscreen posters.

So they glowed in more ways than one, ripping through almost an hour of shape-shifting psych-rock that, owing to their foreboding banks of synths and gadgetry as well as their ensembles, felt like it was being beamed down from a space station. The complexities of Fever the Ghost’s music and the way they stormed through the set barely allowed any time to process it. But at the end of the night, there was the spectacle, and the feeling that’s what Fridays are for.