When I saw Fidlar for the first time last July at the Echo, there were only a few people dancing-jumping in front of the stage and I thought these kids were great. I downloaded their EP right away but eight months later, day for day at the same location, the club is packed to the roof, beer is splashing everywhere, young guys roll on stage legs in the air, young girls violently shake their long hair in my face and everyone, the band included, seems to have the party of their life.
Fidlar put on a wild and sick party on Sunday night, headlining the evening and raising to the expectation with their combination of straightforward surf-punk-rock music. Their dynamite-like short songs were fueled with an endless raw energy sent in everyone’s face like the can of corona, or whatever brand it was, that I almost received in the head mid-set, baptizing me with some beer leftover.
It was a non-stop intense party, as the four members were hardly taking a breath, with a careless attitude, the volume of the guitars and the arms of the crowd up all the time, playing many more songs than I knew. The front of the crowd (and may be the back as well) was in plain mosh-pit mode all the time, and, of course, a few stage jumping and crowd-rolling occurred, putting the security guard on my right side in life-guard alert-mode all the time.
It is true that most of their skate-punk songs trigger a call for a fun rebellion, with adrenaline-injected lines whipping the crowd, long drunken aaah-aaahs or lyrics shouting in repeat ‘Sobriety’, at the risk of sounding ironic with all that supposedly fucked-up attitude.
If I already knew the songs from their DIYDUI EP, like ‘Oh’ and its Wavves-y’ appeal, the Pixies-esque ‘Max can’t surf’, a song frontman Zac Carper dedicated to their drummer Max Kuehn, the rowdy ‘Wait for the Man’ and the thrillingly joyous ‘Wake Bake Skate’ (with which they ended their show), they played many other new songs like the Stooges-esque ‘I wanna be your cocaine’ but also, from what I could read on the setlist, songs with ‘Beer’, ‘White’ ‘No Waves’ ‘No Ass’, ‘Tour’, ‘Whore, or ‘Carmelita’ in their titles.
On Sunday night, these guys showed a true sense of mayhem and knew how to re-invent the fun, mixing thrill and happy, destructive and joyous for more than an hour, while Zac Carper ended up surfing the crowd, and then presented to the public some keys and a cell phone, asking who had lost them… They acted like the Black Lips’ kids if the Black Lips were old enough,…. but wait, two of them, Max and Elvis Kuehn, are in fact the kids of another punk legend, T.S.O.L. keyboardist Greg Kuehn. This could explain some of it….
During and after the show, the vending table was selling ’FIDLAR’ t-shirts as if the band-shirt concept had just been invented,… ‘FUCK IT DOG, LIFE’S A RISK’, this is what FIDLAR means,…. may be I should have bought one of these shirts, these kids are gonna be big.