Steve Hochman on January 21st, 2019

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Dave Alvin flashed a big, bright grin. It came right after he’d ripped out a stinging guitar solo during the Flesh Eaters’ show Saturday night at the Echoplex, in the middle of a version of “The Green Manalishi.” The song, originally by Peter Green and the first Fleetwood Mac, is an intense, harrowing tale of inner torment, demons and disturbing voices. Amid all that, Alvin glanced at his fellow ’Eaters — bassist John Doe, drummer Bill Bateman, vibes man DJ Bonebrake, saxophonist Steve Berlin and, screaming and squalling at center stage, singer/poet Chris Desjardins — and for a second showed unbridled glee.

It didn’t spoil the moment. It enhanced it. It enlivened it. Gave it dimension. And it captured what the fans, packed into the club for this rare appearance of the occasional all-star band that first coalesced in the L.A. literate-punk scene some 40 years ago, were feeling.

See, there’s darkness. And there’s the light in the darkness. The Flesh Eaters, when the act has materialized from the haze, Brigadoon-like, has always flickered between the two, a candle always on the verge of snuffing out, but persistently sparking back aflame.

“The Green Manalishi,” as do many of the songs featured Saturday, comes from the new “I Used to Be Pretty” compilation. It’s the first new album under the Flesh Eaters name since 2001 and only the second to sport this “classic” lineup (half of X and half of the original Blasters backing Desjardins’ quavery, cracked voice and probing poetry) since 1981’s essential “A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die.

With a raft of original songs (written over the course of the intervening years) and three perfect cover selections (“She’s Like Heroin to Me” by L.A. contemporary, poetic punk-blues band the Gun Club and “Cinderella” by Seattle’s ’60s pre-punk garagers the Sonics in addition to “Manalishi”), the incendiary album at once picks up where “…Pray…” left off and takes on depths, reach and, dare we say, wisdoms accumulated through the years, and in the process even manages to increase the intense energy. It’s a neat and rare trick indeed. (And a trick matched by opening band Mudhoney, a “..veteran of the Seattle punk-grunge scene of the ’90s, which carries on that spirit with matured accomplishment around the charming intensity of founding singer Mark Arm.)

From the first skittering notes of “See You In the Boneyard,” a “… Pray…” highlight that’s become the group’s standard concert-opener, it was a gripping evening, a strong tie to the original days when punk was not a rigid fashion-fixed format but an open field of individual expression and ambition. Desjardins’ affectionate embodying of Gothic (though most definitely not Goth) noir remains personal and idiosyncratic in the best artistic senses, and as invitingly self-aware as the cheap horror and spaghetti western movies he loves so dearly and invokes so readily. The band, with the singer’s ex and former Divine Horsemen co-leader Julie Christensen joining in to sing with him on some songs, fully, uh, fleshed it all out superbly.

Saturday, in this hometown stop on a brief tour, the group at once made the most of its considerable individual talents and combined for a truly unified, integrated collective sound. This was as true on such tightly wound rockers as “Pony Dress” (reaching back to a Flesh Eaters’ 1979 lineup pre-dating the “… Pray…” array but recorded anew for “…Pretty”) as on looser ones that gave space to the constituent parts, the jazzy possibilities of Bonebrake’s cool vibes and Berlin’s mood-shifting sax parrying with Alvin’s fiery beyond-the-blues runs, each in this setting afforded the opportunities to explore outside of their more familiar territories.

An hour or so into the set, Bateman started pounding a steady beat, while Alvin, Doe and Bonebrake locked into a, well, you wouldn’t call it a groove, but a simple riff stepping up and down between two chords, a trance-inducing tribal blues over which Desjardins went into tongues-talking preacher mumble, alternating with Berlin finding a mystical dream space. The song, “Divine Horseman,” a captivating seven minutes originally on “… Pray…”, then gave way to “The Green Manalishi” to kick off a compelling sequence of “… Pretty” tunes to finish things out: the furiously paced Mexico misadventure “Wedding Dice,” the dusky shimmering “Miss Muerte” and the encore of “She’s Like Heroin to Me” and “Ghost Cave.”

That final one is a fantastical stab of Andalusian psychedelia, Alvin spinning webs somewhere between Coltrane and Krieger, Christensen providing wordless, Rif Mountains wails alongside Desjardins’ hallucinatory words. Ultimately the two singers exited the stage, leaving the musicians to let the mystic moods take them wherever they could go. Though this version didn’t quite reach the full 13 minutes of the one that closes the new album, it was a perfect conclusion to the show, its explorations following the fans out the door into the Echo Park night, big bright grins on their faces, too.