Mazerati at The Earl, Atlanta, March 31, 2011

Maserati - Athens, Georgia's premier, and perhaps only, psych-dance-rock stalwarts - made a triumphant return from their European tour and played at The Earl last night, churning out a 50-minute instrumental set that lasted well past midnight but still had the crowd calling them back for an encore. In all their sweaty, fist-pumping glory, Maserati are either one of dance music's most viscerally addictive live performers or indie rock's most ingenious hybrid of U2 guitar heroics, Daft Punk's head-slamming, club-burning rhythms, and Pink Floyd's arena-ready psych rock. Speaking of Floyd, that encore they performed was Run Like Hell from The Wall, and it fit them like a leather driving glove.

Maserati may well be one of the most appropriately named bands in rock music today. Listening to their music feels like opening a high-performance engine full throttle and zooming down some highway at well over 100 per. Their two guitarists push each song - and each other - into ever higher gears, yet the band remains cool and in control the whole time, like a fine-tuned machine built for both comfort and speed.

Tony Paterra of Zombi ably filled in on drums last night due to the untimely death (is there any other kind?) of Jerry Fuchs (that's Paterra, not Fuchs, on drums in the video above). Fuchs died on November 9, 2009, from a fall down an elevator shaft.

According to the New York Post, Fuchs had been attending a benefit party in Williamsburg - a fund-raiser for Indian schoolchildren - when he and a friend became stuck in an elevator between floors. The two managed to pry the doors open and attempted to jump across the elevator shaft to the nearest floor, but Fuchs’ jacket got caught on something, causing him to fall to the bottom of the shaft. Fuchs was pronounced dead at Bellevue Medical Center.

Fuchs grew up in Marietta, Georgia, and attended the University of Georgia in Athens. He moved to New York in 1995 and forged a reputation as a dynamic, driving drummer widely esteemed by his peers. Eventually, he played hundreds of shows with multiple bands, including !!!, the Juan MacLean, Turing Machine, and Holy Ghost! as well as Maserati.

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, who will play their last show ever tomorrow night at Madison Square Garden, said that Fuchs was one of the best drummers he had ever heard. “He was one of the only people we all knew who was literally great at what he did,” Murphy said. “And he was incredibly generous with his talent.”

Fuchs is actually the second Maserati drummer to meet a tragic end. In 2005, then-drummer Mikel Gius was run down and killed as he rode his bike on a Sacramento street. But if you didn't know about these tragedies, the band wouldn't have let you know that they were playing with a new drummer, as they sounded tight and well rehearsed all evening.

Interestingly, for once I didn't seem to be the only old person at The Earl. Although Mazerati's been around for at least 10 years, the members are still relatively young (Fuchs was 34 when he died). But between their post-rock, psychedelic sound and the guitar riffs fed through phase shifters, they retain enough vestiges of prog rock that, as The New Yorker recently put it while talking about another band, they "restore the dying faith of many a grizzled hipster in the redemptive power of the guitar and the distortion pedal."

My kind had came out last night to rock with Mazerati before slinking back to our day jobs, families, and mortgages.