By the end of “Lord, I Seen Evil,” his first song of the set, I’m fairly certain Flip Cassidy is going to die onstage (and as sad as that would be  at the very least we’ll get some more use out of the pits of quick lime East Jesus keeps in reserve for the agents of half-assed anemic anti-rock that somehow make it past the dogs and the drunks every once in a while). Because no human being makes sounds like that unless it’s a precursor to spontaneous combustion or a fatal case of decompressive diarrhea. And, honestly, when he says things like, “The name of this next song is ‘Make Sure My Casket Is Closed’ and that’s what it’s about,” one can be excused for thinking the bastard is reciting his own eulogy. But maybe that’s because Flip solo is infinitely different from Flip with co-conspirator Chris Benton and the accompanying weasels in the Junkyard Gospel, and without the inherent ridiculousness of a 6’6” giant playing the accordion to act as a counterbalance, even songs with the tongue-in-cheek bombast of “Bury Me in Whiskey” take a decidedly dirge-like turn. The Right Rusty Reverend does not die in the end, and poor poor pitiful me for forgetting that, however somber and salty, Flip Cassidy is not in fact a human being but a goddamn cartoon character, a Disney prince gone awfully and awesomely rogue, an alternate- and animated-universe Nick Cave in the end stages of a mindfucking by a hyperintelligent strain of syphilis belting out “Straight to You” before the Red Queen’s court.

Above: not an actual person

And I say all this with love, obviously. We all love Flip. We’re positively gay for him. He makes TV walls and his mom bakes the hell out of some lemon cookies. And he brings the most talented sons of bitches to East Jesus, including Orphan in the Afterlife all the way back in January. This time he’s opening for Dum Spiro Spero, an exhausted band from El Cerrito in the middle of a Southwestern US tour, arriving sometime in the afternoon to promptly go the fuck to sleep, necessitating our poaching of the local talent from the Range to kill the time between sets while Flip banged on their tour bus and (presumably–I wasn’t there) started setting shit on fire.

The band can be forgiven the delay: this is the desert, after all, and things start when things are damn well ready to start. And when the poached local talent is a stoned-out-of-his-gourd space cadet wailing on a song about mustaches, well, you actually don’t mind waiting for the headline act so much. Hell, I’m even willing to forgive violinist Rafael Rangell for making my mohawk look like shit next to his.

And of course all this magnanimity is expressed in the hope that karma will forgive me my own trespass, viz. my nigh-lethargic and lukest of lukewarm anticipation as the band set up. Which, considering the auspices of the East Jesus music room, is weak and lazy, but hopefully also understandable, i.e. it was late as fuck, someone was unpacking a goddamn musical saw, and to repeat my own admission from earlier in the day when I looked up from my self-medication to see the most beautiful woman I’d seen in a long time randomly stroll through the sculpture garden–her hair dark and sheer enough to deflect hearts and bullets–“I am way too high for this.”

Mea culpa.

The band’s name is Latin for “While I breathe, I hope”; their latest EP is entitled Carpe Diem, Carpe Nocturnum; they have songs called “Guns Are Poison” and “We’ve Got Faith, We’ve Got Love”–in retrospect, one more round of unconditional pardon will have to be handed out to those of us who were expecting something akin to the clove-smoking neohippies and insufferable shoegazers crawling out of Central Texas–a state that, once upon a time, ate lesser wusses for breakfast.

But really, there’s something amazing to be said for anyone like Anthony Yousko who can not only keep up with the technical mania of his bandmates’ guitar and violin with a goddamn musical saw, but can also use said saw to form backbone ostinatos as instantly catching as the distorted vocals in M83’s “Midnight City.” Or for frontman Bowie Johnson’s ability to keep a straight face while singing lines like: Guns are poison / you can’t plant one and watch it grow. And that’s the beauty of their mushroom samba brand of kinder, gentler, almost-Appalachian Americana, I suppose: their deliberate embracing of what could be considered the relentlessly unhip into their own domain, lacking a single solitary second of irony the entire way. In a better, loving world they’d be redundant. And that’s fucking tragic, and while there’s something to be said for that, too, all I can do at the moment is pray to whatever god I don’t believe in that there’s still some beer from last night left over, because it is a Sunday and while I breathe, I drink.

Seize the carp. Or something.