I still think Fake Figures took the Viper Room crowd by surprise on Friday night, nobody was expecting the stormy, brutal set this band played in the small club.
Frontman and vocalist Rus Martin was screaming his vocals in a savage manner as if he was auditioning for Slayer, but was also taking some interesting detours, even incorporating some lyrics stolen from Lou Reed and delivered in a spoken words manner ‘I am waiting for my man/got 26 dollars in my hand'. Between his furious tirades, he was making grandiose, half-elegant half-arrogant gestures, taking the matador pose, with one of his hands on his waist as if he was ready for a Spanish dance or was proclaiming some victory over some fake enemy.
With song titles like ‘Something deadly’, ‘Let Them Bleed’, ‘Where the Slide is Broken’, and violent riffs coming from two guitars and a bass over thumping drumbeats, the quintet was marring aggressiveness with darkness, just slowing down for a song, the only one sung without all that screaming.
Between songs, Martin was making conversation with a friendly tone, contrasting so much with the destructive and discordant nature of their punk-metal numbers. He plugged their debut EP, ‘Hail the Sycophants’, but these guys are far from being new to the scene as all of them have belong to various bands before: according to their bio, Rus Martin is a former member of Hotwire and has played with the likes of Linkin Park, Incubus and Hoobastank, drummer Justin Pointer was in Nightfall, bassist Bob Bradley was in Scars of Tomorrow, guitarist Heather Baker was in the Iron Maidens, an all-female tribute to the British metal gods, and Travis Miguel was in the metal band Atreyu.
They sure tore down the small stage on Friday night, and I wasn’t sure what to do with their ravaging music, which was nevertheless diverse and was sometimes going into some experimental heavy diversion.
‘Merry Christmas!’ Martin yelled before rushing to their last song. The crowd, as I say, was almost petrified by the violence,… may be it is because I am used to the Silver Lake-Echo Park crowd, they sure would have started a mean mosh pit and some crowd surfing at the first song over there!