E-Mail This Article to a Friend Scene points ‘Dynasty’ says farewell; Brazilian Girls take the piss BY SARAH TOMLINSON AND JEANNIE GREELEY

"It’s just like Studio 54," quipped Evan Kenney of local art-rockers Read Yellow as he surveyed the line outside Great Scott at 10:30 last Thursday night. And at least in terms of Allston’s indie-rock scene, it was: fabulous and over-the-top, albeit in a more welcoming, DIY way. This was the final night of the art + dance + punk mash-up that was "Dynasty," and many of the local musicians and people-about-town who gathered were friends of Honeypump Productions promoter Ben Sisto. For two years, the night was a destination for edgy, danceable music — and a place where bands formed and flirtations blossomed. The farewell included the debut of Beard, who rose from the ashes of local art punks Gold and the Faux. The latter’s frontman, Joe Coelho, dedicated Beard’s first song to late Faux keyboardist Kirsten Malone, then unleashed a blast of tense rock laced with carnivalesque organ and keening vocals. The crowd grew frenzied as the Mules thrashed out a dance-punk twister of offbeat male-female harmonies and hot guitar menace. And as the night built toward its sweaty, bleary end, resident DJs Just Luke, of Night Rally, and Comfortable Matt, of recently broken-up math-punks Clickers, kept the kids on the floor working double time to classics by Salt-N-Pepa and Prince, celebrating not only a kinetic night but also the community that spawned it.

Of all the sounds made by Brazilian Girls at the Paradise a week ago Monday, the most memorable was that of lead singer Sabina Sciubba taking a piss — this while jammed into a bathroom stall with a reporter whose tape recorder was clutched between the singer’s thighs. Whatever your preconceptions of "world music," Sciubba — the only girl in a group of non-Brazilians from New York City — is unlikely to fulfill them. By this point, she’d lost her pink stilettos and shed her matching taffeta tutu, and her nude unitard bore the smeared lipstick stain of an arrow she’d drawn pointing to her genitals to illustrate a performance of the band’s hit "Pussy."

It might’ve come as a surprise to fans of the sometimes spastic, always sultry Franco-German singer that she does indeed have eyes. At a previous local appearance she’d been subdued, fully clothed, and blindfolded; for this one she sported a pair of 3-D-looking glasses with "SI" spelled out across the lenses. "Everyone else can imagine whatever eyes they want to imagine," she told me. "They can be blue and shiny; they can be black and passionate."

Sciubba’s affectations go hand-in-hand with the flamboyant eccentricities of the Girls’ music, which can meander from jazzy, Bebel Gilberto–ish ballads to poppy dance numbers to electro covers of Cole Porter. And it drew an eclectic sellout crowd: silver-haired couples dotted the balconies, peasant-skirted girls crowded the floor, and sweaty preppies pressed against the stage. This was the face of the "music from around the world" (as opposed to "world music") that’s been championed by Emerson station WERS’s weekly Gyroscope, which sponsored the show. And the audience was putty in Sciubba’s hands, even if most of us didn’t understand a single word in any of the four languages in which she was singing.

Jeannie Greeley | jgrls76@aol.com

Sarah Tomlinson | stomlins@mindspring.com