Pop and Jazz : Thrill Kill Kult Makes Friends

On a certain level, industrial-disco shows are all the same: beat, light, smoke and nightmarish distortion. But where Ministry and Nine Inch Nails are often alienating, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult makes friends with the audience.

At the sold-out Palace on Friday, the Chicago-based group put something closer to cheesy, good-natured cabaret into the Angst -ridden performances of its peers. And it worked.

There was Mylar, and a strobe light, and a twirling, mirrored ball, and an on-stage bar where the band sipped cocktails during the show. Women backup singers arose scantily clad, or drifted on-stage hooded as death figures who flicked lighters and let their faces explode into flame. During the encore, one of them passed out flaming cupcakes to people at the lip of the stage.

The music sometimes veered into an upbeat, B-52’s-meet-Gary-Glitter kind of groove. Sometimes it was Doorsy, sometimes straight-ahead, hook-driven KROQ stuff, but always at the poppier end of the industrial thing, powered as much by cranked rock ‘n’ roll guitar as by drum machines. MLWTTKK might be the band that breaks the genre over to the pop fans as Nine Inch Nails has to the hard-rock dudes.