At this point, it has become ridiculous, I have seen them and written about them too many times and Iman told me I was obsessed by FIDLAR. May be, but how could I refuse a free ticket for Artopia, an event curated by the LAWeekly, DJ-ed by Keith Morris and headlined by everyone’s favorite drunk punk band, FIDLAR?
I said everyone because they drain a larger crowd at each show, a crowd of young people decided to have their own kind of fun, ready to get totally wasted while surfing, jumping, moshing and invading the stage to the point to become one big large indistinguishable mess with the band.
New York (or New Jersey should I say?) has intellectual punk Titus Andronicus making all these references to Albert Camus and Shakespeare. Los Angeles has riotous punk FIDLAR making references to coke, weed, skates and cheap beers… Both bands are young and bring tons of punk energy to their shows but don’t seem to come from the same place… existentialism versus teenage boredom, metaphysics rebellion versus carelessness about a life just worth living for being drunk and getting high! Some matter to actually back up Woody Allen’s notorious opinion about Los Angeles being a cultural desert compared to New York! May be, but at the end everything ends up with a big fuck you, ‘I just pray you will not be spared/Fuck you’ sings Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles, ‘I drink cheap beer, so what, fuck you’ sings FIDLAR.
‘All these songs are about LA’ said frontman Zac Carper at the beginning of the show, and yeah all of their garage-surf-punk-party anthems are about the West Coast, the Best Coast! And the rest was only bloody nose, bloody face, Zac’s bloody knees, drunk girl insisting to jump at the musicians necks, dancing crowd on stage,… total mayhem and chaos! I thought I had seen crazy punk shows before, but this one was totally out of control for the good reason that there was so little security if any at all. I mean there was this poor guy who was trying to prevent an amp from falling down because of the repetitive human seismic waves, but that was all he was able to do! Almost the whole time, many people were popping out from everywhere, and were either fooling around or trying to jump from the stage above the solid human wall in front of them. I was on the stage the whole time, just behind the band and taking as many pictures as I could, and I am still amazed nobody asked me to step down. Why would they have asked? Everyone was on stage! At one point, one guy, who was going for a stage dive, pushed me so hard that he made me fell down on my butt, but thanks god another tall guy behind me did cushion my fall.
Chaos and confusion reigned during the whole set and a girl, who had tried to kiss Zac Carper at several reprises, took advantage of one of his back-rolling-on-stage moments, to do the deed, …Girls these days! High on adrenaline the whole time, I was trying to avoid another collision and another fall. From where I was, I wasn’t hearing the vocals much, but the view of all these kids falling on each other was spectacular. The music was played fast, people were jumping and moving fast, and I was recognizing most of the songs I have listened to many times, just interrupted by some technical problems and a few riffs off Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back In Time’. This is how Zac Carper, Brandon Schwartzel, and Elvis and Max Kuehn envision their shows, like a riotous and trashy madhouse, a totally unruly, security-free fucked-up insurrection, where the band and the crowd become one big crazy organism fueled by FIDLAR’s west coast youthful abandonment.
Setlist
Cheap Beer
Stoked and Broke
White on White
No Waves
No Ass
Max Can’t Surf
Suburban Home (Descendents cover)
Whore
Awkward
BOS
West Coast
LDA
The Punks are Finally Taking Acid
Wait for the Man
Coke/Cocaine
Wake Bake Skate
