WHEN I SHOWED up at Thee Parkside, motorcycles crowded the sidewalk, perhaps signifying a greaser summit meeting or, more plausibly, an alcohol-fueled, guitar-driven, eardrum-rattling raucous kiss-off to the previous week's drudgery. Either way, you entered at your own risk.

I don't know whether I was relieved when I stepped inside to find the usual collection of rock scenesters and even some middle-aged tourist types. But Thee Parkside has that kind of suburban-rec-room-gone-to-hell vibe, so it all seemed perfectly natural. From the bright red "Applause!" sign above the small stage to the metal buckets filled with the bands' comped bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, there's a homemade feel to the proceedings, like a family putting on a show in their basement. And every suburban home has a garage, right? You know where this is going.

The first "act" of the evening were the Lamps, a band whose singer proudly announced, "We're the Lamps from L.A.," which has got to make you worry a little bit. Another cause for worry was that same vocalist's resemblance to Jakob Dylan, not to mention that the two other band members were sporting de rigueur skinny ties. Then again, maybe I'm just a worrywart. The band's lurch into first gear was a tad shaky, but by the third or fourth song, their shifting got smoother, and they chugged through some enjoyable, if unremarkable, three-chord rockers with a viscosity similar to that of two-year-old motor oil. Garage rock, indeed. Can you say "odometer fraud?"

Things got a lot more interesting when Killer's Kiss took the stage. On their first song, "Shot Down," they turned what little air was left in the room into a shag carpet-thick wall of sonic sludge redolent of spilled beer and sweaty sheets and sticky soda pop – not unpleasant aromas that, in an almost Proustian way, make the mind's spark jump to an adolescent energy level. But what the hell was I thinking? It's just rock 'n' roll, kids – of the let's-play-in-the-sandbox-with-amplifiers-turned-up-to-10 variety. The S.F. band's sound was a junkyard assemblage of Oblivians, vintage Lyres, and the Trashmen, classic parts welded on a new chassis: '60s garage, '70s punk, and '80s indie rock all going for a dysfunctional family road trip. The band were stripped down to the primer like a muscle car, and you could feel every bump in the road.

Lead singer and guitarist Chris Owen (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is a Bay Guardian staffer) cajoled and pouted like a punk rock Tom Sawyer, petulantly exhorting his bandmates to go faster and play louder, pounding on the keyboard and challenging his cohorts to musical duels on "I'm a Fighter," all while screaming out the words to the songs. Oozing a sort of volatile Celtic charisma, if you threw in a couple of karate kicks, he resembled Van Morrison in The Last Waltz, an endearingly zealous spastic.

There was no rhythm section per se, but rather the whole band acted as one big motorized percussion instrument, churning out loud riffs over an insistent backbeat. Lead guitarist Clark Mosher occasionally contorted his lanky body and let loose with a wiry, fiery guitar solo, but mostly he just served it up extrachunky in a sort of Americanized glam style. Drummer Ian McLean (who, also in the interest of full disclosure, happens to be my upstairs neighbor as well as a no-shit grease monkey with the dirty fingernails to prove it) probably wished he had an amplifier for his drums to compete with the all-enveloping din, and bass player Chas Glynn was the calm, Buddha-like eye of the storm. But the real secret weapon was Jen Hale's keyboard playing, keening electric blasts that had the stabbing-knives-in-the-brain effect of sunshine ricocheting off chrome. She put a candy-apple enamel finish on the band's careening sound.

Lyrics don't seem to be a very important ingredient in the Killer's Kiss recipe, which isn't to say they were inconsequential. Vocals tended to be shouted and spit out into the sweaty chaos, blending with the instruments like the sound of the wind whipping past the windshield of a speeding car, but it didn't really matter: the focus of the band was on delivering a wallop to your innards rather than a come-on to your brain. Which I guess is a good idea, since you could get motion sickness by thinking too hard while trying to navigate such a twisted road.

By the time the last band – an L.A. power trio called Flash Express with a front man who looked like Jack Black impersonating Neil Diamond by way of Urge Overkill – started up, I knew who had won this talent show. The home team, of course. (James Yamasaki)