Hello Lobster Friday & Saturday, Jan. 18 & 19

[January 16th, 2008]

[SYNTH POP] Since 2002, they’ve been living among us, observing the inanities of life here on “Planet Zero”—NASCAR, low-rider Honda Civics, the band Creed—and reporting back to their superior officer via catchy synth-pop tunes. But Hello Lobster recently announced its upcoming return to Planet Lobster: “The mission has been aborted,” says vocalist Lobster 1. “It’s hopeless here on Earth.” He has trouble articulating what’s wrong with our planet. “Just look around,” he says, as if it’s far too obvious to describe.

Out of the 3-D glasses and white shirt that constitute his band’s “uniform,” Lobster 1 is Tony Altamirano, a 31-year-old Art Institute film student and Pearl District waiter. Altamirano confides he doesn’t really think Earth is that hopeless—he and his bandmates just don’t have as much time to make fun of it anymore. “We’re all going in different directions now,” he says. “We decided to call it quits before the shows suffered [from] lack of enthusiasm.”

Altamirano and company started Hello Lobster while attending school in Eugene in 2002, as a joke at the expense of American pop culture, “douchebags, and all the hipsters.” When he moved to Portland in 2003, bassist Ruben Markstrom (Lobster 3) and keytar player Taylor Morden (Lobster 2) soon followed. The band found kindred souls in wacky Portland acts like the Punk Group, and its ridiculous songs about flute-playing elves and cities where there’s nothing to do but get haircuts earned a following among the sort of geeks who get tattoos of video-game controller symbols and listen to nerdcore hip-hop acts like MC Chris. Hello Lobster even met idol Mark Mothersbaugh, frontman of Devo, last summer and informed him that he’s actually an alien lobster. “We told him he’s the head lobster, and he loved it,” Altamirano says, imitating Mothersbaugh’s silly voice exclaiming: “Hello lobster! Hello lobster!”

This may not really be the end for Hello Lobster—for one thing, the group has enough unrecorded material to add a third full-length to 2002’s Casio Rock and 2006’s The Last Days of Planet Zero. And Altamirano agrees the Hello Lobster experience is too good to really be over. “It was probably the funnest band you could be in, because there were no rules,” Altamirano says. “We’ll probably emerge—” he adds, cutting himself off for a quick correction: “We’ll probably come back to Earth.”