The good and almost weird thing about attending a hardcore concert is that there are about 100 guys for a girl, I realized this when I arrived at the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock, where The Dillinger Escape Plan was scheduled to play on Wednesday night; the sad thing is that I was way too old for 99% of them, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, I was feeling a bit out of place,seeing that the opening bands had already warmed up the place with a mean moshpit and the usual risk-taking crowd surfing, and I was thinking about hardcore and its obviously profound significance for these people: all this corps-a-corps-fake-violence, this close contact and intense sweat bath, and of course the shouting, the extreme screaming, ear-to-ear, each other’s arms around the other’s neck,… what was this about exactly?
People looked totally mad at each other with grim expressions replacing smiles on their faces, but they actually seemed to have a great time and it was a strong bonding, a strong male bonding fueled by an adrenaline-rush.
As soon as muscular frontman Greg Puciato came on stage and shouted his lungs out to ravage everyone’s eardrums, it was the beginning of a crazy ride that didn’t stop till the end and rarely slowed down for a few seconds. Of course it sounded a little bit exclusive because if you don’t know the lyrics like me, the message is inaudible and it looks like you have to be initiated to some weird cult to fully enjoy it, but it didn’t prevent me to be fascinated by it.
Touching is important in hardcore, people are all over eachother all the time, and space or rather conquering all the space is the key.These guys – mostly Puciato but also the guitarists later – were everywhere atthe same time, jumping on each other, fully occupying the stage and beyond, constantly jumping on the crowd in aggressive moves. It was a strange and thrilling spectacle and I thought something bad could eventually happen when Puciato was taking more and more risks climbing at the top of the amps, exciting the crowd with many ‘motherfuckers’ and jumping flat on the receiving hurling fans. He was like an acrobatic chimpanzee in a destructive mode, re-bouncing on everything, at ease in his amps jungle. ‘This is much more fun than in a big place’ he said at one point.
In this apocalyptic ambiance, it was difficult to really pay attention to the music. It sounded like a long violent howl vomited by Puciato’s over our heads, with some half-melodic moments, mixed with hard aggressive metal guitar riffs and also complicated, intricate cacophonic or discordant parts assured by Ben Weinman and Jeff Tuttle on guitars, Liam Wilsonon bass, whereas Billy Rymer on drum was making waves going faster than you can process. Hardcore, grindcore, mathcore, injection of metal, the music was devilish and the band was restless, aggressive,… actually an understatement to qualify their constant screaming and earth shaking assaults, managing to put the crowdin a rare frenzy of stage-diving-crowd-surfing during the whole show.
They played many songs off their 2010 album ‘Option Paralysis’, then an equal number of tunes off their older albums, ‘Ire Works’, ‘MissMachine’, and ‘Calculating infinity’ (at least this is what I’ve guessed from the setlist taped on the amps) but, as I said it was all about space, the five guys owned the room, sonically and physically, I mean I had never seen musicians doing some crowd surfing with guitars before, but they did, even bringing part of the drum set later on.
I had found a place on the right side of the stage and stuck with it during the show, sometimes looking at the guy next to me holding the shaking amps, and hoping he would manage to maintain them in place till the end.
There were a lot of notes in this cataclysmic slaughter, each beat was a stab in the stomach, each scream was felt deep, and it ended up with an occupy-the-stage, as the most enthusiastic fans had invaded it. At this point, I could not understand what was going on anymore, I could not see anything, the light projectors had turned red and green, and a beast was agonizing in a melee of fake rage.
Setlist:
Panasonic Youth
Room Full Of Eye
Milk Lizard
Good Neighbor
Gold teeth on a bum
Weekend sex change
Sugar coated sour
Endless endings
Farewell Mon Lisa
Chinese Whispers
Fix your face
Sunshine the Werewolf
43% Burnt