East Bay psych-prog heavyweights headline Eli’s Mile High Club

OAKLAND — One of the Bay Area’s current leading lights on the psychedelic-meet-prog frontier of heavy music, Mondo Drag plays its first local show in two years at Eli’s in Oakland Friday.

Founded over decade ago in Davenport, Iowa, by singer/keyboard player John Gamino, guitarist Jake Sheley and guitarist/synth player Nolan Girard — the three childhood friends started playing together in their teens — Mondo Drag recorded their debut album New Rituals in 2009 that was released on Alive Records the following year. A relentless touring regimen would follow with the group appearing regularly at festivals and sharing stages with like-minded acts including Dead Meadow, Witchcraft, Black Mountain, and Bay Area bands Sleepy Sun and Wooden Shjips.   

After several line-up changes that at one point found former Radio Moscow members (and the future core of psych band Blue Pills) Cory Berry and Zack Anderson taking over vacated rhythm section positions, Mondo Drag would relocate to Oakland in 2013, eventually adding drummer Ventura Garcia and bassist Andrew O’Neil. The band signed to Riding Easy Records, which released their eponymous effort in 2015.

The quintet earned some of its best reviews yet with the fuzzed-out guitar leads and swirling Hammond organ and synth grooves heard on the record. Its growing reputation led prog-metal greats Mastodon to hand picked Mondo Drag to open a packed free Converse Rubber Tracks show at the Chapel in 2016. Later that year, the group issued its follow-up — The Occultation Of Light — prior to heading out on a European tour playing with the likes of Pentagram and Elder. Powered by the band’s growing arsenal of vintage keyboard sounds, the album delivered hefty sounds that at times recall the heavy-prog boogie of ’70s British rockers Uriah Heep.

While the band has had some extended lulls in activity, Mondo Drag is emerging from hibernation to play its first Oakland show in two years at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland presented by Talent Moat ahead of an appearance at Psycho Las Vegas later this month. The group will debut new drummer Jimmy Perez (who also plays in SF power trio Chief) as well as new material at the East Bay performance. 

Mondo Drag is joined by a pair of notable support acts. LA-based psych crew Hooveriii  (pronounced “Hoover 3”) started as a one-man band project by Bert Hoover, who had fronted hooky garage-punk band CAB 20 until that band split up. His early drum-machine experiments would gradually evolve over a number of recordings, eventually leading Hoover to put together a full band that started releasing heavily reverbed sounds not too far removed from fellow LA garage-psych groups like Osees, Fuzz and Meatbodies.

The band would expand to its current six-piece line-up by the time it recorded last year’s Water For The Frogs — their first for The Reverberation Appreciation Society — drawing inspiration from both ’70s krautrock and the albums recorded in Berlin by Bowie and Iggy Pop that pulled from some of those same German influences. For the band’s latest effort A Round of Applause, Hoover and company tightened their song structures for the band’s most infectiously melodic collection of tunes yet. Opening act and Hooveriii touring partners Mohama Saz are an adventurous band based in Madrid, Spain that mixes elements of Turkish psychedelia with synths and jazzy saxophone, creating an east-meets-west collision of mind-expanding music.  

Mondo Drag with Hooveriii and Mohama Saz
Friday, Aug. 5, 8 p.m. $12-$15
Eli’s Mile High Club