Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza; Mon 29

It is completely disingenuous in this day and age to pretend that rock is only about the music, man. So once again: If you play in jeans and a T-shirt, your image is as much of a construct as that of a band in monster outfits. In both cases, however, it’s still the songs that make or break an act.

Fortunately, the aforementioned monsters, the Finnish quintet Lordi, also happens to have the tunes—a fact often overlooked in pieces about the band, which tend to focus on its admittedly demented look. How Lordi, which opens for Type O Negative at this show, manages to nimbly deliver catchy, fist-in-the-air hard rock in such cumbersome getups borders on the miraculous. Sure, they can’t really jump around onstage, but the musicians compensate with good ol’ riffage. Sound and vision? Now that’s hard to top.