Joe Lally, Mouthbreather, Gravitas
Art Hospital, 1021 S. Walnut St., Bloomington
Monday, May 19, 8 p.m., $7, all ages

Monday’s show at the Art Hospital in Bloomington features a trio of power trios, each with a different take on the tried-and-true guitar-bass-drums (and vocals) format.

Bloomington’s Mouthbreather traffics in the sort of angular, willfully abrasive noise-rock made (in)famous by the Jesus Lizard and any number of Steve Albini bands. Their music, along with their sarcastic and plentiful between-song banter, has an almost purposefully obnoxious, up-your-nose vibe — which is actually kind of refreshing in a local scene that’s sometimes a little too precious for its own good. That’s not quite how they see it, though.

“I think Bloomington is more of a rock town than people give it credit for,” says guitarist-vocalist “Rob” (he declines to give his last name). “I have seen some truly out of control basement shows where kids were smashing around all over the place, and I think it is to be encouraged.”

Also from Bloomington are Gravitas, a trio of recent transplants to the area whose sound is a bit harder to pin down. Together for only about a year, they have already developed an ambitious yet effortless-sounding synthesis of all sorts of heavy-duty guitar-rock from the past several decades. Their exploratory, heavily (though not entirely) instrumental jams seemingly reference everything from Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys to Fred Frith and Bill Laswell’s Massacre to the shuffling breakdowns on any number of early Black Sabbath tunes. Just don’t call them “stoner rock,” as a recent promo blurb floating around in advance of their local shows has done.

“We feel that ‘stoner rock’ is kind of a bullshit label thrown onto music to sell something,” writes drummer Tyler Damon via e-mail when asked about the label. He rattles off a list of bands who’ve had that tag applied to them — including Sleep, Melvins, Eyehategod and Dead Meadow — but notes that “all of those bands are very, very different. We draw influences from those bands, but it's not all we listen to, you know?”

Headliner Joe Lally, meanwhile, is best known as the bassist for Washington, D.C., post-hardcore ideologues Fugazi, who have been on a self-proclaimed “hiatus” since 2002. Apparently, Lally has stuck to his old band’s tight-lipped interview policy, so we’ll just say that as a singer and band-leading presence, he’s a fine bass player. His trio, rounded out by drummer Ricardo Lagomasino (Capillary Action) and guitarist Jonathan Morris (D.C. Improvisers Collective), will be dipping into songs from his recent pair of solo albums, 2006’s “There to Here” and last year’s “Nothing Is Underrated” (both on Dischord).