With jambalaya simmering in the corner, and people waiting in line to get a haircut, you wouldn’t have thought you were in a bar, let alone at a rock show. But last week, upstairs from haircut-and-a-shot night, The Red & The Black was in fact hosting a lineup of several very different styles of local music. Despite a modest midweek crowd — consisting mostly of other bands — one group from Baltimore introduced a unique sound and amped up the show with big venue energy levels.

The Hot Magic were the highlight of the night, making everyone aware of their presence as a futuristic synthesizer hummed through the bar. And for the hearing impaired, it would have been hard to miss Symbol, the band’s front man, step onto the small stage behind his keyboard dressed in tight pants, a sailor hat, and flashy eye make-up. On their MySpace page, they describe their sound as “driving a golf cart through deep puddles of cough medicine,” and they couldn’t be more accurate. The tight drumming and riffs provide a structural backbone colored with the trippy modified lead vocals and spacey synth. It’s what you might expect if Prince shared the stage with We Are Scientists, a peculiar combination but one that works surprisingly well.

While Symbol has a few solo albums, The Hot Magic seems to be just getting started with recording. We spoke with Symbol about the band and discovered that like a cough syrup induced hallucination, much about these rising rockers is left open to interpretation.