These bands should get back together

They’re following Jake and Elwood’s lead and getting the band back together.

Of late, a bevy of great Vegas groups, such as The Loud Pipes, Skorchamenza, The Pandas, the Black Jetts and others, have gotten things going again.

I’m stoked that those bands are back in action, to varying degrees, and although we’re on a roll, here’s a few more reunions I’d like to see:

MISERICORDIAM: Seeing these dudes live was like playing chicken with a freight train: It was either get out of the way or get flattened. First time I witnessed them crater a stage was at Fire Fest in ’06, where they more than held their own with any and all national acts during the then-burgeoning deathcore boom. Almost comically overwhelming, they were just plain faster and more fierce than anyone else. No wonder they burned themselves out — you needed a mountain climber’s stamina just to get through one of their sets.

SPARKLER DIMS: Sparkler Dims’ tunes registered as a kind of anesthetic, something that left you comfortably numb. They could conjure a drone like no other, carving songs from a fog of guitar while never getting lost in the haze. But rather than lull you into a near-meditative state, as some acts of this ilk are prone to do, the Sparkler Dims were fond of disrupting the mood that they would so skillfully cultivate. The band was addictive. I’m still in withdrawal.

JUPITER SHIFTER: Jupiter is hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth, which is roughly the distance between this trio and garage rock orthodoxy. Sure, their repertoire was grounded in primal, post-“Nuggets” punk grit, but it was as if it were played in some alternate dimension, where the standard laws of rock ’n’ roll didn’t apply. Equally catchy and off-kilter, familiar and vaguely futuristic, this bunch was suggestive of Mooney Suzuki if they actually heralded from the moon.

FLASPAR: One of the awesomely unforgettable shows I’ve ever seen in Vegas was the time Japanese psych rock changelings Acid Mothers Temple flambeed central nervous systems at the Flaspar house in spring of ’06. Flaspar would sadly move to Portland a few months afterward, and then slowly drift toward inactivity, but the fact that they could hang with a band as brilliantly unhinged as the aforementioned Far East space cases testified to Flaspar’s brain-scrambling brilliance. Their tunes were electronic-based and free-form, a vast prairie of sound devoid of fences. They loved to experiment, but could still produce something resembling a pop song. Basically, they could do just about anything — except keep it together.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.