I just can tell you that these ‘Horse the Band’ guys triggered much more enthusiasm and hysteria than the other guys with the mirror moniker, ‘Band of Horses’ last time I saw them,… no offense for the indie group, but what I saw on Saturday night at the Bootleg was plain crazy, like a collective mind-possessed experience, simultaneously lived by a wild crowd of weird kids.
People were already going crazy as the band was installing the material on stage, they were already screaming and a girl with a hefty cleavage was starting to freak out. The theater was packed and the previous band, Kitten, had already torn the place down leaving the front row kids super excited, chanting stuff I couldn’t make sense of, like drunkards on New Year eve… Two large and tall security guards were already posted on the edge of the stage trying to unsuccessfully calm down these crazy kids and the show hadn’t started yet! I was expecting chaos, and I wasn’t even close!
And OMFG, it was a wild one! A brutal and mad scene acted by psychiatric ward escapees or just kids who wanted to have fun? There was a boy who was wearing a hamburger hat and a few others dressed in full banana suits, what was that exactly? I felt even more like a total stranger, since there was a very honest and strong fusion between the band and the audience: the whole crowd was like one unique person raising its arms at the same time, touching, embracing, pushing, hugging, kissing the members of the band at any occasion, girls and boys animated by the same passion and desire.
The music was weird, violent and bipolar, with abrupt changes in tempo, switching between a sort of metalcore violence – most of the time Nathan Winneke’s powerful and beasty delivery was definitively between metal and hardcore – and other calmer genres, the whole thing always backed up by this irritating Nintendo sounding keyboard, which made them baptize their music by the goofy name of ‘Nintendocore’. The level of energy didn’t go down even a second, there was of course a lot of crowd surfing and stage diving, and people were head banging against the stage to the point to give themselves serious headaches and may be some cerebral fluid leaks, while the tommy-gun-style of the drumming was accentuating the fury of the performance. On stage, it was an all-jumping experience, the guy behind the keyboard was stabbing its machine like a maniac, and I would say there was a little bit of some playful Richard Simmons’ aerobic dancing going on during the electronic/techno dance parts of the songs. The security guards couldn’t contain the human waves as I saw them repeatedly fall down on the stage, pushed by the rushing audience. At one point, another guy who had been sitting on stage, and who did not seem to be really part of the band, took Winneke’s place behind the mic, and even outdid the master's performance, when participating into a ferocious crowd-bath-surfing.
Where was all this rage coming from? And it was not that much rage, rather some insane release of joyous and riotous energy, at the end it was a loving communion with the band, since I had never saw so much touching and sweaty body contact in my life, I even seen a young girl hugging and kissing Winneke on the mouth while he was running out of the stage, and she may have been his girlfriend or not.
Really, the scene looked more like a goofy cult-gathering caught in the middle of some bizarro celebration than anything else, and I was the outsider, ignorant of the rules and regulations. I didn’t understand anything of the lyrics, it was way too loud and too screamed, and I couldn’t make any sense of what Winneke was saying between the songs, talking about pizza and references that went way above my head judging by the little research I did afterwards: ‘Winneke’s writing style consists of highly metaphorical and absurdist lyrics, often referencing various Nintendo and comic book characters’, he ‘is also the leader of an online "cult" named "The First Church of The Mechanical Hand", in which he regularly wrote nihilistic and absurdist articles about the worship of a fictional deity, "The Lady of The Mechanical Light", and he ‘has two alter-egos, one being General Beam, which according to Nathan is "like Jim Beam in clothing, essentially", and the other being SUPER SAPPHIRE, a mysterious astronomical being which apparently possesses Nathan’.
What did I say? A Super Mario cult? Add to this craziness some David Lynch’s references and a last album ‘Desperate Living’ inspired by John Waters' film of the same name, and you may have just overdosed on the divergent and deviant. Do they try too much to be weird? No, no, they were total naturals.