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IF YOU GO

Knoxville Brewers Jam, featuring Matgo Primo, Senryu, Mic Harrison and the High Score and Scott Miller and the Commonwealth

WHEN: 2-8 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: World"s Fair Park, downtown Knoxville

HOW MUCH: $25 ($10 for designated drivers)

CALL: 522-1604

ON THE WEB: www.knoxvillebrewersjam.com, www.matgoprimo.com

By Steve Wildsmith

of The Daily Times Staff

One thing's for certain -- you've never been to a show like one put on by Matgo Primo.

It's not that the Knoxville foursome camouflage any instrumental shortcomings by overloading the senses with a visual assault of outlandish wardrobes and eyebrow-raising makeup patterns. In fact, they can play quite well; check out two distinctly different tracks at www.myspace.com/matgoprimo.

It's that by combining its onstage theatrics with some tack-sharp instrumental skills, the guys in Matgo Primo make for a truly fun rock 'n' roll experience.

"I go to a lot of shows here in town, and the thing that I like most is that I don't see much else like us," guitarist and keyboardist Dorian DeLuca told The Daily Times this week. "I know a lot of musicians say that about their bands, but it's true. We try very hard to make our shows very exciting, to make them very lively and very full-of-energy. That's why we wear the various outfits that we wear -- to get the audience involved in the music and involved in the visuals as well.

"It's very important for us to get the audience involved, so that they're not just standing there, and we go as far as we can to make that happen. And most of the time, we get some really good reactions from the sheer flamboyance of the show."

The band is the brainchild of singer, guitarist and songwriter Tim Eisinger, who put the group together two and a half years ago after moving to Knoxville from Chicago. (His brother, drummer Greg Eisinger, is also in the band.) He put a notice up in Market Square's Tomato Head restaurant soliciting bandmates, and DeLuca answered. What he discovered was a guy with a vision.

"From the very beginning, Tim wanted Matgo Primo to be the sort of band people would dress up to go and see, almost to point where it's a `Rocky Horror Picture Show' sort of thing," DeLuca said. "The idea is not just getting people to show up to see a band, but to show up to see Matgo Primo. We sort of set out thinking we were going to be a synth-pop band and that the music was going to be a throwback from the 1980s -- dance music with a more guitar-driven sound from time to time.

"But since we've been together and the music has progressed, Tim's songwriting has gotten a lot tighter and we've moved away from the synth-pop aspect of the music. Now, we're getting into themes that are more important to us. At first, we were writing songs that were poppy and catchy, but now that they're more important to us personally, it's made us more excited about playing live shows because the songs have more meaning."

Just because the songs have more meaning to the band members, however, doesn't make them entirely clear to those in the audience. And even the band members aren't always sure where Eisinger's lyrics come from -- DeLuca recently asked the singer about the lyrics to the song "Holes in the Walls," which has received airplay on WUTK-FM, 90.3 The Rock.

"For the longest time, we had played it and I didn't fully understand what the song was about, so I sat down and asked him," DeLuca said. "I found out that it's a very symbolic song to him and very meaningful, because it's about his childhood. And knowing its depth and meaning makes it much more important to all of us.

"Tim can be quite out there sometimes. His lyrics can be away from this Earth. What he tends to do is pick a thing -- an event he witnessed, or something that happened to him or even a television show that he saw -- and write this crazy world around it. As a listener, it comes across with this intense feeling around the song, but maybe from line to line, you might be wondering where it's coming from."

And as the music has become more meaningful, the band has slowly scaled down its visual assault on the audience. That doesn't mean there's going to be a KISS-like "Matgo Primo without makeup" phase, but it does mean that the guys want to call more attention to the music they're playing.

"That's something we're talking a lot about, because from starting out, we wanted to be as flamboyant as possible and outrageous, but now we feel like the band is more focused," DeLuca said. "We still have the stage presence, and we still want the band to look big. We still want people, when they see us in the audience, to say, `Ah, that's a member of Matgo Primo.' But we're now honing our image to let our individual personalities come out in the clothes we wear.

"We want to stand out, to be energetic on stage, but we also want to put as much effort into the music and being as meaningful as we can be. We don't want to overpower the music."

The music already packs a big enough punch, he added. In fact, the new music the band is writing -- hopefully for a release on Knoxville's El Deth label by year's end -- is almost better suited for bigger venues like Saturday's Knoxville Brewers Jam.

"We've actually played a number of outdoor shows, and we're always amazed at how good we sound outdoors," DeLuca said. "We started out as a club band, but the truth is that the music we're writing has almost been a little too big for the venues we've been playing. We have these big, grandiose parts and huge crescendos that lead to these large places, and when we're playing a small venue, it almost feels trapped, like the sound doesn't have any place to go to.

"I think what we're going to discover this weekend is that we've been playing these clubs, but that our music is built for a big place, and the songs are really going to shine when we're out there on the festival stage."