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Video made the Plastics

Feminist, one-woman band performs tonight

Two of the first words describing Tracy and The Plastics on their website are lesbian and feminist. That's manageable. But add "video artist" to that equation, and Ms. Tracy is treading dangerous ground that has already been tread and retread, often badly, in years and decades past.

But those words fail to typify the band. With a name like Tracy and the Plastics, a little something retro, sexual and strange is bound to happen. Wynne Greenwood and her electronic equipment will bring that style to Gardner tonight.

But wait, where is Tracy? Where are these infamous Plastics?

They all came along, transmitted straight through the wires to the speakers and the video screen. Greenwood plays Tracy live and interacts with onscreen, prerecorded band mates, also played by Greenwood. Nikki on keyboards and Cola on drums are projected behind "Tracy." The band's songs sound sort of like a one-woman, pre-pop Le Tigre: minor-key, electronically-influenced tunes spoken/sung in a somewhat sarcastic tone. Surprisingly, Tracy and the Plastics sound just as clever, just as excited and just as hardcore.

But Tracy's about more than the music. The two video-screen band members rock out in the most appropriate place to make subtle statements about women-the domestic sphere! By exploring the symbolic possibilities of nail polish bottles and basement stages, Tracy and the Plastics have taken their act everywhere from the Whitney Biennial to Harvard to queer discos, so fans of all of those scenes might be in Gardner tonight.

Detholz, who opened for 3,2,1 Activate! last fall, have come back to play another opening round. They get compared to Devo in part for their twitchy remakes of '80s classics like "Sussudio" and "Like a Virgin," but they also shine in their intense originals: songs like "I.M.A. Believer" and "Behold the Man," which lampoon their evangelical Christian upbringing and revel in their rock-and-roll lifestyle.

Very obscure indie groups need to bank on their ability to be compared to other indie groups to get a crowd, so throwing out names like Le Tigre and Devo might garner a crowd. Friday's bands will bring something markedly less marketable, but the full set may deliver something equally, if not more, inventive.

-reviewed by Emilia Garvey

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