Right away, the Sacramento hardcore band Trash Talk installs terror in the room, I have seen a few hyper-aggressive punk hardcore band in the past, but there is something especially frightening about them! There were playing at the Echoplex on Tuesday night, during one of their ‘Check Yo Ponytail’ nights, supporting their friends MellowHype from Odd Future, and of course the crowd was young, mostly male, either high on weed, or ready to release a furious energy.
These kinds of shows are a sort of intense sport, seriously, this goes way beyond music, the performance is as much an acrobatic demonstration than a musical experience! Guitarist and bassist Garrett Stevenson and Spencer Pollard opened the arena game with drummer Sam Bosson, and, as soon as vocalist Lee Spielman stepped on stage with his ultra ferocious delivery and constantly aggressive attitude, banging his long hair and jumping right in the middle of the crowd, it was chaos. I was desperately trying to catch him on film, but this guy couldn’t stay a second still, plus people were violently pushing, everyone was trying to climb on something to see the mad scene, so my attempt to capture anything of the mayhem was a total lost cause. Just like my review, I mean what’s the point to describe the ambiance of such a hardcore show? Chaos has to be lived and felt in the flesh to be understood! But each time, I am just amazed that nobody gets hurt when I see these multi-diving done by people running fast from the stage and landing on the heads of others.
Playing his apocalypse-announcer role at perfection, Spielman was particularly impressive, he jumped numerous times over the people’s heads, making acrobatic pirouettes in the process, rolling head first as if the parterre of people was his new trampoline or a soft grassland, owning the whole place with confidence, a destructive attitude and some combative stunts. He used the whole crowd-surface as Jesus-Christ-turned-evil walking on water,… you would think this would finally collapse, but no, each time Spielman was back on stage faster than the light, swimming his way back through a sea of hands, legs and other body parts.
‘This song is about my city’ screamed Spielman before singing ‘Sacramento is dead’. Many songs, announced as ‘old ones’, were short, loud with violent riffs, but not everything was fast, as the band sometimes ventured into sludge metal territory with guitar solos and a few seconds of slowing-down for Spielman.
The security guards were of course on constant alert, very well aware they would not be able to stop this constant stage diving, but trying to catch weed smokers and stage divers when the band was precisely encouraging those behaviors.
There is no doubt that Trash Talk gave an intense and relentless performance and being quite close to the stage just amplified the fear for me! But their aggression was… stylish, they seemed to have refined this stage diving business to the perfection, coming straight from a culture of free-style weed-smokers-skateboarders,.. and rappers? The night was filled with other rap acts, and I realized that all these kids, punks or rappers, were all after the same things. I mean they continued crowd surfing during Mellowhype’s act, the energy hardly went down, the pot smoke may have increased a bit, but the body contacts and the assaults never stopped. There were no real genre dichotomy here, just a brutal reclaim of a furious youth identity, which has been lost in mainstream rap and predominant R&B culture.