Arc Flash stays grounded despite stalker cyborgs

On a drizzly weekday, I meet the members of Arc Flash on the rooftop of a parking garage in downtown Lawrence.

“We were kinda feeling the whole Deep Throat thing, ya know?” one of their e-mails had explained.

The three members of this Lawrence garage-rock trio are strikingly dressed for this meeting. Drummer Mark Osman wears a paint-stained overall snowsuit and no shirt, and a fleece ski mask covers most of his head and face. Lead singer and guitarist James Thomblison is in an aquamarine-colored turtleneck knit dress with lightning bolts detailed at the shoulders. And bassist Lewis Guillen cultivates an early Bob Dylan look with dark pants and a jacket. Though the day is gray and misty, all three wear sunglasses, and they don’t remove them for the duration of our time together.

Arc Flash’s weirdness can be intimidating. In live performances, the band has a jarring energy. The tension in their music gives the band a disconcerting, antagonistic stance. Onstage, they kill their instruments, and offstage, they give a maniacal vibe.

Three minutes into our interview, just as Thomblison finishes detailing the band’s origin story — Arc Flash started as a duo in November 2013, with Osman joining and making it a trio in late 2014 — an electric-guitar riff drowns out our conversation. The riff grows louder with each passing moment. At first, it sounds like a distant soundcheck. Then it becomes clear that someone with a guitar is ascending the parking-garage stairs.

“What the fuck?” Guillen mutters. He leans over the railing, peering down a shadowy stairwell.

A tall figure, wearing a gas mask with a mobile amp strapped to his back, appears at the top of the garage like a haunting, hulking monster of the apocalypse. He marches across the parking lot, the guitar riff playing on a loop.

“Fuckin’ A,” Osman exclaims. The figure stops in the center of the parking lot and pulls out a neon-green Nerf crossbow.

“This happens from time to time,” Thomblison says.

“Is this an auxiliary member of your band?” I ask.

“No,” Thomblison responds. “He’s a trans-dimensional cyborg. Sometimes he just appears out of nowhere and attacks.”

I nod and take this as my cue to find cover. I dive behind a white sedan and furiously scribble notes about the scene unfolding before me. “Most bizarre interview ever,” “hell demon + Nerf balls,” “WTF.” The trans-dimensional cyborg draws back his weapon and releases a shower of Nerf arrows. Two strike Thomblison.

The monster runs out of ammunition, ending the attack, and he skulks down the opposite stairwell of the parking garage. We return to our interview and our discussion, while the members of Arc Flash act as if nothing extraordinary has just occurred.

So I ask about their latest release, March’s Black Market Time Tech, and they tell me that it was meant to be a demo EP — something they could offer people on tour.

“We did that pretty quickly,” Osman says. “It took like an hour. We went and basically live-tracked it at SeedCo [Studios].”

The EP turned out better than they thought it would, and the band sold out of its limited cassette run. (Arc Flash is planning a 7-inch release of new material, but the date is still to be determined.)

The distorted voice of clinical psychologist Lee Pulos opens Black Market Time Tech. “Hello,” Pulos says over a glittering melody of keys and chimes. “As you listen to this tape, your conscious mind focuses on the music, while your inner mind hears and responds to selected subliminal messages.”

This soothing 47-second interlude, titled “Instructions,” is quickly eradicated by eight tracks of blistering, moody psychedelic garage rock. Over the next 25 minutes, the Lawrence trio unleashes a neat and noisy earworm. For the most part, these songs feature undeniable pop hooks and tight, muscled drumming. They form a cohesive unit, despite various nuances: “Titan” is high on surf-rock vibes; “Critical” comes off like a breathless temper tantrum; “Earls” is a friendly summer jam.

Thomblison’s voice sounds layered with the instruments’ melody rather than a focal point of any song. His words are so encased in reverb and distortion that it’s nearly impossible to discern what he’s saying. Whatever subliminal messages Arc Flash has embedded in Black Market Time Tech, they are deeply buried.

Bizarre though Arc Flash is, the band members are remarkably articulate about their place in the Lawrence music scene. They take drags off cigarettes and shuffle their feet. It becomes apparent that their weirdness has been wholly accepted — if not applauded.

“I feel like everyone really influences each other,” Osman says. “People go to each other’s shows, but we’re also friends and we hang out because we like each other. There’s just a ton of rad people doing rad shit in this town, and I feel like we have an embarrassing amount of really great talent. It’s a really close-knit community, but it’s also a really inclusive community.”

These three musicians, all in their mid- to late-20s, peer at me from behind their sunglasses. They’ve survived a cyborg attack and opened up as much as they could.