By Duncan Scott Davidson

MY FRIEND BEN and I made up a game called Steel Cage Match. Like most games played to kill boredom while driving, and somewhat similar to Ben and myself, it's simple to the point of being moronic, though liable to entertain for periods of up to a half an hour. Car-mates take turns coming up with mythical bouts between historic and/or contemporary figures – sort of a personalized Celebrity Death Match. For instance, G.G. Allin versus Henry Rollins. OK, that one's easy: G.G. kills Henry and eats his brains and/or poop. You can put wimpy-but-ruthless types in the cage: Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates. Advantage: Gates, if he stood to win a dollar on the match. Combatants need not be celebs, but a good rule of thumb is to not throw fellow passengers into the cage together. You may get carried away and have to pull over for a roadside battle royale.

What's this got to do with the June 22 all-Neurot show at Great American Music Hall? Bands don't always get along. Musicians have forceful personalities. What if, in the close, steel-cagey confines of backstage, a tiff ensued?

So, for the sake of entertainment, let's throw LA's Red Sparowes in the imaginary cage with NY's Made Out of Babies. All the openers will be in top form just to prove worthy of sharing the stage with aural annihilators Neurosis. We've refined our concept: This will be a Sonic Steel Cage Match. Two intense bands doing totally different things, battling until ears bleed.

Gimme some sugar

The breakdown: Our first contender, Made Out of Babies, henceforth to be called MOoB to spare myself the frustration of writing the full name over and over. Every time I write it, it becomes more brilliant or more asinine. I can't tell which. Do I like this name, or, as a papa-san, am I revolted by it? Either way, MOoB's new album, Trophy (Neurot), features a picture of a rabid carousel horse on the cover, and hits hard, fast, and below the belt. Instant nut shot, right out of the box. You get exactly 14 seconds of sludge-funk thump and bump with some reverbed-out guitar as they drift out of the corner to the center of the cage, before vocalist Julie Christmas breaks into a "Daddy, can I have a Power Puff Girls ice cream?" sweetly shrill falsetto: "With broken fingers / And broken nose." Soon she's belting hard enough to cause organ damage to herself. At the very least, she's going to make the challenger's ears bleed. The band kick into a riff-heavy head charge reminiscent of Alice in Chains back in the unkillable-rooster days, but more menacing and un-radio friendly. It's as if they were free to just rock, without having to worry about mansion mortgages.

Christmas's voice continues to be a weapon throughout the recording – a mix of Babes in Toyland's Kat Bjelland, an ADD-wracked five-year-old in a Pixy Stix OD, and a schizophrenic Tenderloin bag lady having three concurrent arguments with the voices in her head. And I mean that in a good way. In "Gut Shoveler," she's a charnel house sweetheart, following the tribal thump of drums with rabid growling. "I shovel guts to bones," she belts; picture pigtails, one of those overgrown swirlie lollipops, and a pink, frilly apron covered with bloody pig intestines. The stomach churn continues with "Sugar," reminiscent of an over-the-top Michael Gira spiel: "I've got scabs on my knees / I pick them I eat them ... I eat flies with honey ... My gums are all bloody come give me a kiss." The "flies with honey" bit reminds me of John the Baptist, who ate locusts with honey. Christmas, like the prophet that heralded the event of her last name, is the "voice of one, crying in the wilderness" – this time heralding a dark new age.

Or maybe not: "I follow you around / To see you home safely / And I've had too much sugar / But I'll see you home safely." The song makes me think about some of the worse-off homeless people I see in the course of my job as an HIV tester: beat down, sick of being sick, missing teeth, missing veins. These people have been through the wringer and are still being squeezed, strung out on the grownup version of "sugar": crack, smack, meth, what have you. Christmas gives voice to the chronically lost and abused with her histrionic wails, and I think of the meat grinder scene in The Wall: all these doughy-faced proto-kids, robbed of identity and individuality and ground into mediocre kid-loaf. MOoB address what we become in the interim between a ray of light, sugar and spice and everything nice, and scab-eating tales of ordinary madness. That crazy crackhead you cross the street to avoid is someone's bouncing baby girl. We're all made out of babies, silly.

Wind-up bird chronicle

In the other corner, from the smog-ridden streets of LA, Red Sparowes. Once again, my hackles go up when I see the name. Not sparrows. Ye Olde Tyme Red Sparowes. Is this a band or a fucking Ren faire? Or a Chaucer seminar? "The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye, daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede." When this year's At the Soundless Dawn (Neurot) showed up in my mailbox, I thought: art history majors with perhaps a dash of goth, "nobody understands me" melodrama.

Of course, this was before I'd heard the album. I'm not going to say they don't have their pretensions, but they're more modern than anything with a ruffled collar and doublet. (Some jerk will write to the paper to point out the difference between the time of Chaucer and that of doublets. Please, though, save your energy for painting your pewter chess figurines.)

The CD's song titles form a complete paragraph. See what I mean about "not without their pretensions?" They're a bit too long to quote outright, but they go something like this: (1) We were alone and didn't know shit. (2) Buildings and pollution appeared. (3) Wow, cities! (4) Everything was mechanized and convenient – we thought it was tops! (5) Oh, shit, what have we done? (6) We're really fucked now. (7) We're dying and scared, and boy, do we feel stupid.

Does this sound familiar? It should; it's your life, asshole.

Sorry, my bad. How 'bout a hug, champ?

At the Soundless Dawn is an instrumental epic, roughly covering the period from the beginning of existence to the end of it. You don't have to know this for it to make a good soundtrack to a marathon session in the sack or something to listen to while driving through Texas in the middle of the night, trying to spook yourself out. You've got to find the mood, young Jedi.

This is the alternate soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi. It's cinematic and symphonic. It happens in movements, not songs. This will not get you pumped for an epic session at the skate park, bro. I know this is going to make the band want to kill me – which could actually be dangerous, as there's a fine line between D&D aficionado and "nuttier than a shithouse rat" – but if you can get behind what Godspeed You! Black Emperor are doing, then get down to your music store and buy this. This is a symphony about entropy. A controlled measurement of disorder in a closed system. The blissful rise of mechanized existence, and it's inevitable downfall. It's got mechanical bird sounds, for chrissakes. If, however, you want something that sounds good whilst chirpin' the tires of your Camaro, may I suggest British Steel, by Judas Priest?

Microcosmic meltdown

Ultimately, I don't think we have a Steel Cage Match at all. I think what we've got is big trouble in the sandbox. Red Sparowes are the borderline autistic savant, digging in the corner, absorbed in the creation of a Micronaut universe, which, as those of you who went outside as children might not know, were the late-'70s robo-cyborg geek-out toy par excellence: Utopian miniatures with interchangeable parts, they were an apocalypse waiting to happen.

Storming through the sand like a junior Erwin Rommel, here comes MOoB, wrapped in a violent extroversion of equal intensity to RS's stoic self-absorption. Reveling in me-ness. There's a quote I've had stuck in my head since I was 11; I think I picked it up from a Psychology Today at a doctor's office: "If you kick a dog, you're going to make it mean. The whole system is a madness machine." MOoB's reaction is to tear down the rot, while Red Sparowes build their own universe for the pleasure of documenting its inevitable fall, one toy robot at a time.

What a cop-out to say "no winner." Hey, look – the game doesn't play itself. You've got to pick your winners. In any case, there's something so out-there and alone about both of these bands that they're sure to become best friends – as soon as MOoB spies RS the isolati geeking out in the corner, storms over and smacks him on the back of the head so hard that his glasses fall off, then stomps on his carefully constructed robo-hive. Oh well, it was bound to fall apart anyway.

Red Sparowes and Made Out of Babies play with Neurosis and Grails Wed/22, 8 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, SF. $17. (415) 885-0750.