Psycho Las Vegas feels like a far-out family gathering — PHOTOS

In a dark room reverberating with sounds darker still, the man on stage preached liberty through noise, one voice that spoke for many.

“Feedback will free your mind and set you free,” sang Jus Oborn, frontman for Stonehenge-heavy British metallers Electric Wizard, his words delivered in doleful tones as his band approximated the gloomy lurch of a funeral procession stuck in the mud.

It was late Saturday night at a dimly illuminated, shadow-filled Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel, and Oborn had just encapsulated the operating principle of Psycho Las Vegas, a three-day quest for the apogee of distortion.

Flanked by large screens that played ’70s occult and bondage flicks awash in fake blood and real nudity, Oborn and his bandmates threw their black hats into this power-chord arms race with songs like “Funeralopolis,” quoted above, which is a sort of stoner-metal Sermon from the Mount.

This is what Psycho Las Vegas was all about: noise, guitars, more noise, more guitars. With a communal, come-as-you-are vibe, the whole weekend had the feel of a heavy-metal family gathering meets “The Big Lebowski,” a laid-back get-together with an ensemble cast of far-out characters, from gray-haired dudes in Captain Beefheart T-shirts to Yeti-shaggy heavy-metal epicureans with tattooed lady-friends in tow.

They all but took over the Hard Rock, thousands strong, flocking to see bands that required patience, who promised delayed gratification — if they had any interest in your gratification at all. It was rock ’n’ roll at its most unabridged: hey, if a monster riff is worth playing once, it’s worth playing 20 times. In a row.

As such, Psycho Las Vegas was largely posited on the creation and sustaining of moods. If there was a unifying principle from the broad array of nearly 100 bands that performed, which ranged from Germanic sludge metal duo Mantar to the gauzy psychedelia of Dead Meadow, the Kraut-rock-informed sci-fi instrumentals of Zombi to the horn-powered funk of The Budos Band, it was that most acts favored exploration over expediency, breadth over concision, pushing against the various contours of their catalogs in order to find a groove, dig in deep and go wherever the moment took them.

To this end, there was very little between-song banter from the stage for the duration of the fest, with few bands inclined to disrupt the mood with superfluous rock small talk. Save for modest lighting, there were practically no production flourishes, elaborate stage designs or other distractions, the exception being Alice Cooper’s headlining set at The Joint on Sunday, where the rocker was draped in a living python and zipped up in a straitjacket.

Bands were culled from every decade of hard rock, from ’60s garage rock misfit The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, who soothed The Joint with late-night soul on Friday, to contemporary standard bearers of heaviness, like Swedish black metallers Tribulation, who performed at the Hard Rock pool on Friday, countering a pleasant breeze and swaying palm trees with blast beats and synchronized headbanging.

Because there was such a broad range of musical eras represented, the fest traced the evolution of hard rock in real time.

Take ’70s mainstays Blue Oyster Cult, who played The Joint on Saturday. Throughout the weekend, you could hear the band’s influence on a number of other Psycho acts, from the stop-start riffing that powered Fu Manchu’s odes to Camaros and the cosmos on Sunday, to the dreamy multipart harmonies of Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, which buoyed songs where sweetness and malevolence co-mingled on Saturday at The Joint.

Toward the end of their set, Blue Oyster Cult played a signature hit, “Godzilla,” a song with one of the most devastating hard-rock riffs ever, a true musical representation of a city smashing, stories-high lizard.

If that helped set the standard for ground-quaking power chords four decades ago, Oakland’s Sleep and Japan’s Boris have done the same in more recent times. The former demonstrated as much on Sunday at The Joint with a performance that was kind of like the metal version of transcendental meditation, hypnotic and inward-looking, while Boris proved adept at making heavy music feel light on its feet Saturday, with songs that were as intricately constructed as a spider’s web, yet delivered with the rousing howl of a series of battle cries.

While Psycho Las Vegas embraced plenty of heavy-metal and hard-rock conventions, the fest also provided a platform for bands more inclined to challenge or subvert them, like San Diego’s Drive Like Jehu.

For plenty of acts on the bill, heavily distorted, Black Sabbath-steeped riffs serve as rock ’n’ roll comfort food, which the Psycho crowd eagerly gorged on.

In Jehu’s case, however, their overheated guitar interplay was more akin to a feast of razors, antagonistic, propulsive, invigorating.

“This is like a runaway train right now,” one onlooker gasped to a buddy near the end’s of the band’s set at The Joint on Friday.

Said train got a rollin’ earlier that day when Converge stormed The Joint with break-the-mold hardcore brought to loud, shrieking life by frontman Jacob Bannon.

A heavily tattooed, praying-mantis-of-a-man, Bannon looks like Converge sounds, all hard angles and restless energy. He throws himself into the oncoming rush of his band’s songs with the physical abandon of a dude hurling himself into traffic just to see if he could live to tell about it.

“I just like to play music,” Bannon said at one point. “It’s the only thing that makes my head feel right.”

That sentiment carried the weekend, no matter if you were standing on stage or in front of one.

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.