Crowd unsure when to applaud at show

Is it a song or just guitar feedback?

The Berlin Aliens performed to an almost empty venue on Monday night at the Ogden Theatre. The band who got their start in their friend Jordan’s garage-turned-studio in Littleton, took the stage of a venue that isn’t a crumbling house condemned by the city for the first time in their career.

The reverb-laden set seemed to maintain a steady tempo not dissimilar to a death march. The audience was unsure if it was one song, or several that bled into each other. At one point, the melody of Pat Benatar’s “Love Is A Battlefield,” could be heard played on a pipe organ. According to the band, this song was inspired by the fact that Jordan’s mom no longer will allow them to practice at the garage-studio anymore.

Their set list contained anywhere from three to 47 songs. It’s not entirely sure exactly how many were actual songs and how many were actually mic-checks lasting nearly 40 minutes.

“My buddy Alex seemed kinda into it,” Kyle Phillips, a resident of the venue said. “He was just leaning against the wall amp nodding along. Or maybe he was asleep, I couldn’t tell.” Indeed, it appeared that Alex, slumped in the corner, was not conscious.

The occasional smattering of applause broke out when an instrument had accidentally been unplugged, which gave off the impression to the confused crowd that a song had ended.

At one point during the engaging, seven-hour set, some audience members were unsure if the band was playing “Monkey Trick” from their latest record or just tuning their instruments. “I think there was a chorus,” Phillips said. “And I’m not sure if the bass guitar was plugged in. I mean, Brian [the bassist] was, like, really getting into it, but I couldn’t hear anything other than screaming,” said Phillips.

Blake, another crust-punk inhabitant who lived underneath the venue in a small dirt pit, said, “I really liked their use of a chain-saw. It really drowned out the sound of anything else happening on stage. It was dope,” shouted Blake, whose eardrums have been completely obliterated when he decided to stand directly in front of the subwoofer.

The audience had mostly left by the end of the band’s 36-minute ambient drone cover of “Dead Cops,” by Millions of Dead Cops.

April Fools.