Puscifer, the band founded by Maynard James Keenan of Tool and A Perfect Circle, has left plenty of people struggling to get a handle on exactly what the multi-faceted group is about. Having released a third full-length Puscifer album, “Money Shot,” last fall, Keenan is still keeping fans guessing, even as the band’s music grows more focused.

Keenan says he’s not sure an audience can be open-minded enough to fully understand and embrace the level of malleability he envisions for Puscifer. But he offered a fairly concrete example of what he would ideally hope would be possible for the group.

“I don’t think we have an audience that can really get this,” Keenan offered in an early March phone interview. “But the whole goal of this band and this multimedia project demanding to be as flexible as it is, is I would love to roll in (to town), let’s say we do the ‘Money Shot’ tour. And some random date in the middle of the ‘Money Shot’ tour, we do from top to bottom AC/DC’s ‘Powerage’ and ‘Let There Be Rock’ (albums) and that’s it. The people in the audience, you’ll have a huge percentage of them that are (mad) because they didn’t get to see the ‘Money Shot’ songs. But the other ones will go ‘That’s what Puscifer is. We got to see the weird show, the random one.’

“That’s the audience we’re trying to build,” he said. “We’re trying to build that flexible, forgiving isn’t even the word (fan base). They’re along for the ride.”

When Puscifer emerged with the 2007 debut album, one facet of the band gained particular notice – its humor. Keenan feels has gained more of a musical identity with the 2011 album, “Conditions of My Parole,” and “Money Shot.” And especially on the latest album, music and intelligent lyrics have come to the forefront.

“The first actual full-length album for Puscifer was recorded in hotels, recorded in studios across the country, in a bus, very much all over the map,” Keenan explained. “It was a very chaotic, evolving thing. So as far as putting your finger down on a particular personality on the album, it was hard to nail that down. I think we expressed a lot of our intentions as far as approach to the music…It’s all over the map. There’s comedy. There’s weirdness. There’s melancholy. There’s a lot on there. The next record, of course, speaks more of a place.”

That second album, “Conditions of My Parole,” was recorded mostly at Caduceus Cellars Bunker, the studio in Jerome, Arizona located at Keenan’s thriving winery, and he feels it began to reflect the surroundings where it was made. The second album also marked the emergence of Keenan’s songwriting collaborations with multi-instrumentalist Mat Mitchell and singer Carina Round.

With “Money Shot,” they have essentially joined Keenan as the core of Puscifer. Keenan, Mitchell and Round are credited as songwriters on all but one song (“Smoke and Mirrors,” a Keenan-Mitchell co-write), with Mitchell often creating rhythm tracks over which Keenan writes melodies and lyrics, while Round creates some of the vocal melodies, harmonies and vocal accents.

“Money Shot,” to a point has two major musical personalities. The first half of the record is made up mostly of more atmospheric, but still edgy tracks like “Grand Canyon,” “The Arsonist” and “Galileo,” that blend guitars, keyboards and electronics. The latter half is more aggressive, especially on stormy rockers like “The Remedy” and “Moneyshot”

With three albums in eight years – plus four EPs –Puscifer has easily been Keenan’s most active musical project over the past decade. The last studio album from Tool was 2006’s “10,000 Days” and A Perfect Circle hasn’t released a studio album since 2004.

Keenan said he hopes he will work again with his main A Perfect Circle collaborator, Billy Howerdel, and make new music with that band. As for Tool, there have been signs of life recently, including a 17-show tour this past January, but Keenan wasn’t promising any new music from his main band.

“We’ve found a common ground,” he said. “We just can’t seem to move forward.”

For now, Puscifer is on the road for a second leg of the “Money Shot” tour, which stops at the Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside on Thursday, March 17. Keenan said there’s more to the show than a band playing songs. On past tours Puscifer has woven sketch comedy, video and social commentary into its shows, but Keenan didn’t want to spoil the surprise for concert-goers by offering specifics.

“I feel like watching a band kind of stand up there and regurgitate their songs…there’s something, just that element of the live performance, to me, is kind of boring,” he said.

“So I’d rather not present that. There should be a show around it,” Keenan said “At the end of the day, though, of course, the songs have to reach in and grab you somewhere. Music, the sound, has to penetrate. It can’t just all be all show and all potatoes and no meat…But we kind of take you outside your normal expectation of a show initially, kind of set you back on your heels.”

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