By Chris Varias
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Surf music isn't the most serious strain of rock. It's not the most multifaceted, either.

Los Straitjackets have the right idea. They take a fun brand of music and add visual fun, which is almost enough to equalize the monotony of what they're playing.

The "Los Straitjackets Rock & Roll Party" at the Southgate House Friday night was just that, a rock 'n' roll party - with surf guitars, and song introductions spoken in Spanish, and go-go dancers, and Mexican wrestling masks.

The masks are the trademark of the Nashville-based instrumental band. Each of the four Straitjackets took to the stage in matching black turtlenecks, jeans and canvas gym shoes, and each outfit was topped with an individualized silk-looking mask that wraps completely around the head. There were masks for sale at the T-shirt booth, and a few customers in the crowd of 250 were sporting them.

More visually stimulating were the World Famous Pontani Sisters. The scantily clad, three-woman dance troupe performed before and during Los Straitjackets' set, and their act was indebted to such shimmy-shaking forebears as the caged Whiskey A Go Go dancers of the 1960s.

Such gimmicks, plus the band's own choreographed maneuvers, made the show about more than just music. They're fine musicians, and their mostly up-tempo 80-minute set never really lagged.

But how much instrumental surf music can one audience take? This one, which was perhaps fueled by copious amounts of liquid refreshments, could take a lot. Altogether there were about 21 songs set plus five more in two encores. These included: classics from the surf songbook alongside Straitjacket originals; themes from The Munsters and Batman; and worse (or best, depending on one's point of view) of all, a surf rendition of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On."

The openers, the 45s, are also '60s throwbacks, but their medium is garage rather than surf. Like the Greenhornes and Thee Shams, Cincinnati's two major contributions to the current garage-rock wave, and unlike many of garage groups who inject a measure of art into the mix, this Atlanta quartet plays high-energy, mid-'60s, R&B-tinged rock as if they've never heard any music from the Summer of Love and beyond.

E-mail cvarias@enquirer.com