I have been exposed to some punk hardcore shows since I have been living in California, and each time I realize that, just like for rap, I feel a bit like an outsider. Hardcore is lived like a religion by many people, and you can witness a fervor, a physical participation of the audience which do not see its equivalent at any other show, and with American Nightmare last Sunday night, this had never been truer. What a scene, what a chaos, what a battle, but it was expected.
Although, the two bands that were opening for them at the El Rey were also hardcore (Rotting Out and Bl’ast), they didn’t manage to raise hell like the punk band from Boston, and it could be simply due to the fact that people were truly here for American Nightmare and nobody else, or that there is something quite unique about this band, a sort of elegance in the middle of mayhem, a poetic vibe hardly perceptible with all the screaming and moving happening. Rotting Out, or rather its frontman, was suffering from a short breathe so that he was having these worst-than-Kanye long rants between the songs to recover and was still heavy breathing after a few minutes,… and ‘I am getting old’ became a start of one of his rants… The songs were fueled by pure aggression, the guy had the physique and attitude of an alpha male chimp ready to jump on a rival – and I am saying this all the love I have for chimps – and the space in front of the stage had cleared up for people to start a mosh pit. They were heavy lifters and I thought several times he was about to have a heart attack on stage, but may be it was part of the game. I expected more violence and a more aggressive pit with the second band, Bl’ast, but it didn’t happen either, people were listening rather stoically. They were old-school hardcore, a band which started in the 80’s, with a noisy raw busy sound, some heavy drumming and energetic assaults, sometimes a bit more sluggish with some un-propulsive detours and sudden accelerations and ex-Kyuss/QOTSA Nick Oliveri on bass. Then, came American Nightmare (Give Up The Ghost) and the whole room changed.
It is true that the band broke up in 2004 after two studio albums, that they were rechristened as Give Up the Ghost after some legal drama with another band also named American Nightmare, and it’s also true they have only played a handful of shows since their reunion. I managed to see part of their set at the FYF in 2012 and it was a crazy scene. There was no difference this time, when you can see more people on stage (ready to stage dive) than musicians at any moment of the show, you know that the rules have totally been broken, that security guards haven’t even bothered to try. The air had the smell of a bloodshed, the violence looked phenomenal but in a sort of romantic way, as there is always a real aesthetic in the way these bodies are flying in the air in all directions even though the falls may have been be harsh for some? All these people jumping from the stage look like a perfectly choreographed ballet.
But the man of the night was frontman Wesley Eisold, he owned the place and commanded the crowd with a sort of Kill-Bill-stunt-choreography and an abandon in the way he was almost falling and throwing his limbs in the air in all directions. Tall and thin, born with only one hand, a long bang covering his face and whipping the air, he had quite an allure, half fallen hero raising hell, half deity coming back on earth with a vengeance, a stunning and spectacular vision affronting people who were jumping on stage and sometimes bumping into him. The guitar riffs may have been blasting and slicing my eardrums into small pieces, the drums may have been firing like a tommy gun and the yelling may have been incessant, people were living the music and the lyrics to the core, screaming in choir with Wes, arms and legs in the air…. According to what I have read ‘Wes Eisold is a poet of the highest caliber, capable of bending word through rhyme with simplicity and expertise like light through a prism’, but it was really difficult to perceive any of the lyrics behind all this lung-exhausting screaming. Reading some of his lyrics once home, I got it, this guy writes with a bleeding heart and screams his feeling with a visceral anger until his throat bleeds, ‘Dreams are trash/On the side of the road/All starry eyed – tongue all tied/There’s something you should know/I could have died with you/And Boston is the reason/I’m feeling so blue – damn you’, he screamed during ‘There’s A Black Hole In The Shadow Of The Pru’, which can only accentuate the romantic side…
I may not have gotten everything at this moment, the music or the lyrics, but it’s clear that something really powerful and lyrical was happening in front of me. Guardedly, I had decided to stand on the side, inside a little balcony, a bit protected from the mayhem as I didn’t want to… die under a pile of corpses? But I could see everything, wondering whether people were coming for music or only for the thrill of stage diving. It was a ballet of human desperation and melancholic fury and even though I knew so little about American Nightmare and their music I could relate and was part of this endless combat. Hardcore will never die.
Setlist
(We Are)
Protest Song #00
There’s A Black Hole In The Shadow Of The Pru
I’ve Shared Your Lips So Now They Sicken Me
Hearts
Crime Scene
Bluem
Young Hearts Be Free Tonight
We Killed it
(And It’s Sometimes Like It Will Never End)
AM/PM
Shoplifting In A Ghost Town
I Saved Latin
Postmark My Compass
Calculation Nation
Please Die!
Farewell
Your Arsonist
Encore:
Love American
