Kick Out the Jams: The Mothers Anger at Cooler Lounge, Nov. 13

I'm sitting in the Cooler Lounge at 10:30 on a Saturday night, and the place is a graveyard. So empty the music blaring from the jukebox actually echoes in the room. What the hell? Where are the jostling punx, the tattoo brigade, the leather-jacket underdogs who make this place such a roughhousing weekend joy? Even the few Bud-sipping geezers who usually flee the place after sundown feel safe sticking around tonight. Chalk it up to that bane of the bar in transition, the "under new management" curse. The Cooler is dead on a Saturday night. Unforgivable.

Suddenly, I feel hands moving over me, caressing my back and chest. The homeless lady on the stool to my right is trying to take my clothes off. I snap her hands away with an instinctive Karate Kid wax-off. "Whatsamatter?" she says, opening her eyes. Wrong guy, she realizes with a grunt of acknowledgment, swiveling to her right, back to her boyfriend.

Whatever. But dead nights do afford opportunities to chitchat with bands who'd otherwise be mere stage props to spice up a beer buzz. Tonight's headliner, the Mothers Anger, hails from Tel Aviv, Israel, and singer/guitarist David Stitch tells me some tour stories before taking the stage with drummer Jim Nostalgia. Like how they ate earlier that day at Circus Circus--in the employee lunchroom. "We have no money, so we just found the sign that said 'Employees Only' and walked in," he says. "Everyone's so busy with their own thing, they just assume you work there. What's the most that could have happened? They kick us out?"

The band's hour-plus set energized the noncrowd with meaty rock built on catchy figures from Stitch's guitar, tuned to supply both bass lines and axe-fuzz. Songs such as "Now You're Gone"--a panting paean to romantic loserdom--stomped with a surging melancholia somewhere between Springsteen and Cobain, but Stitch's clustered hooks were the real grabbers. "Requiem 4" and "Solitude"--which had Stitch snarling over Nostalgia's pounding punk march--brought the crowd to its feet. Crowd meaning me.--Andrew Kiraly