A DeafHeaven show is quite an overwhelming experience, these shoegazing metal guys from San Francisco know how to set up a thrilling atmosphere that jumps at your throat like Jack the ripper. They were playing at the Echoplex on Friday night, a full house, and a long way since the day I had seen them doing an in-store performance inside the small Vacation Vinyl store, 2 years ago.
There is something lyrical, theatrical, and dam dangerous about vocalist George Clarke’s performance. Tall and dark, his chin up in the air, he was throwing scary sights at the crowd like a hunted/haunting beast and I wasn’t sure if he wanted to hurt all of us, hurt himself or if he was in deep suffering. Their music marries beauty and horror like it’s rarely done, with moments of heartbreaking quietude and sudden outbursts of fury, habited by Clarke’s agonizing shrieks… it was a spectacle mimicking a tempest in the middle of which Clarke was throwing his rigid body to the crowd like a sacrificed victim, it was also a ceremony, as he was often kneeling down in front of the drum set, and nothing sounded or looked like a joke, despite the theatricality of the scene. I sometimes got the impression to have in front of me a sort of Clockwork Orange’s Malcom McDowell – it must have been the combination of elegance in his gesture, arrogance, aggression and sexuality, as he was regularly putting his hand inside his pants while plunging over the crowd. Or may be, he was a Shakespearian hero crying his revenge and despair with charisma, as I could have seen him holding that skull in one hand, crushing the bones and bleeding all over the place. In any case, I was fascinated, I couldn’t detach my eyes from his blood-thirsty tortured character, who was installing violence and agony with the elegance of a ballet dancer and a pair of black gloves… who wears gloves on stage?
Although they were responsible for this loud, ear-bleeding level of noise, nobody was actually looking at the musicians, whose guitars and bass were reaching some summits in the decibel scale. I was close to the stage and my clothes were vibrating and trembling with the sound as if I was exposed to high winds. Clarke’s vocals were going from bestial howls to horror whispers suspended over our heads, and the whole things sounded and looked very cinematic. He was sculpting feelings of anxiety, torment and despair with a sort of grace, taking these long immobile pauses and looking like a warrior contemplating his destiny or the slaughter he has just done.
He didn’t say a word to the audience before their last song, just saying something like ‘Thank you, we are Deafheaven from San Francisco’, but before he had taken the face of many people between his two gloved hands, even kissed one at the top of the head, and dived over the crowd several times, stiff like a dead corpse.
The whole show appeared like a very long song, as they weren’t really stopping between songs,… but it resonated even more epic that way. The woman next to me was singing all the lyrics, something which isn’t an easy thing to do when everything is screamed to that ear-cringing octave, and the scene was strangely unusual for a metal show, she was singing with that smile on her face, all-eyed for Clarke. I also noticed several people holding ‘Deafheaven’s latest album, ‘Sunbather’, that they had just bought at the club. The cover of the vinyl was pink salmon, a sunny tone for a black metal band? But I read that the color is meant to resemble that seen on the inside of one’s eyelids when laying in the sun, thus the title of the album… With lyrics like ‘In the hallways lit up brightly/but couldn’t find myself. I laid drunk on the concrete on the day of your birth in celebration of all you were worth/I am my father’s son/I am no one/I cannot love/It’s in my blood’, Deafheaven is the emo-romantic of metal and, now that I think about it, they were much closer to Bright Eyes than to Megadeath.
Setlist
Dream House
Irresistible
Sunbather
Please Remember
Vertigo
The Pecan Tree
Encore
Unrequited
