Trash Talk really scared the hell out me, I know I am a novice regarding hardcore, but man, were they sounding brutal and bloodthirsty! They were opening for Fucked Up at the El Rey on Tuesday night, and frontman Damian Abraham once said that they had ‘the most violent pits I've ever seen’, and he is not a novice.
From the first riff to the last one, there was an atmosphere of danger floating around, built by the melody-less, fast, violent and very short songs, which just seemed to be an outlet for frontman Lee Spielman’s screams of rage. Prove me wrong but I simply can’t imagine listening to such music at home except if you are in the mood for killing someone, these guys are made to be seen living in their own element, the stage and the pit.
As soon as they started their barbarous and tenebrous outbursts (I read somewhere they started with their slow and heavy ‘Hash Wednesday’), the crowd made a giant mosh pit turning like a mad swirl and occupying the whole room. Spielman was barbarously encouraging it all the time, but as soon as the song was over, he looked normal and civilized and even thanked the security, who was ‘cool as fuck’ as he put it. Yeah, they had to be cool to made such a chaotic place as safe as possible.
Just like Fucked Up frontman, Spielman spent more time in the pit than on stage, but his savant pirouettes above the sea of people had nothing to do with Abraham’s fondling of the crowd; they were those of an agile felid braving gravity, jumping back on stage before you knew it. I could not understand a word of what he was yelling, and spitting like a repetitive machine gun, but he seemed to be the angriest person I had ever seen, haranguing the crowd, kneeling down and destroying the place with an evil energy.
They got what they intended to do, I had some visions of the apocalypse as body were surfing around and people were going crazy, pointing their fingers and fists to each other’s face, falling down on each other in a domino effect, so that I had to grab some guy’s t-shirt to stay on my feet.
The long-haired singer disappeared from my view a few times in the mosh pit, continuing with his barbarous and hair-curling howl while drummer Sam Bosson, guitarist Garrett Stevenson and bassist Spencer Pollard were keeping up with their violent-trashy-metal-hardcore.
But I survived, we all survived the savage trash-armageddon, but I bet some people woke up the following day with a few bruises, like this barefoot girl who was looking for her shoes after the cataclysm… ‘If you find the other one, let me know’, she said while smiling.