Sunday night at the Knitting Factory was a scream-fest, and I don’t mean that in a positive, Halloween-like way. The band that played before Stiletto Formal was a group of guys painted in neon and bathed in a wave of black light – they had an Amsterdam-style otherworldliness that made them, if nothing else, visually engaging. It didn’t take more than a few screams, though, for me to start wondering if I could buy industrial-strength earplugs at the bar.

Relief came a painful 30 minutes later when Sunny Davis, the attractive electric cello player from Stiletto Formal, sauntered on stage wearing a green dress, black tights and white stiletto heels. Lead singer Kyle Howard followed her and much to my chagrin started screaming into not one but two mics. I felt like I had been duped.

WTF!? Had all singers forgotten how to sing? The music wasn’t bad, but as they say in the old country, “It’s hard to focus on the road when your copilot is screaming into your ear.”

Another painful half hour later, Moros Eros took the stage and slowly set up their instruments and a skull-shaped candle, which they lit dangerously close to the back curtains.

“It’s nice to have a sold-out show in Hollywood,” singer Zach Tipton said, causing four of the dozen or so people in the club to turn around to see if the room had suddenly filled up.

For the third time that night I heard screaming instead of singing, which brought me to the sad conclusion that all the bands whose songs and videos I had enjoyed so much on MySpace had clearly been replaced by zombie doubles. A sad turn of events.