With the San Francisco band Deafheaven, it is all about announcing the Apocalypse, I mean, I am not sure of the meaning of the songs, as I couldn’t understand a word of what singer George Clarke was yelling in endless agonies, but they were installing a sort of atmosphere predicting that something terribly bleak was about to happen.
I remember seeing them at Vacation Vinyl, and I got to get very close to the singer who was screaming his lungs out, just under my nose, but here they were again, this time touring with Russian Circles and playing their unique mix of black metal grindcore, hardcore – can we even talk about a genre for this kind of music? – in front of the large public of the El Rey theater, last Friday night.
Their long, slow-burn songs often installed a hypnotic and throbbing shoegazing, before escalating or falling (depending on how you feel it) in hell, thanks to Clarke’s theatrical moves and tortured-beast howls, able to horrify the hell out of anybody. Holding his fantastic and triumphant pauses like an olympic Greek athlete, while grasping the mic stand with both hands, he was fighting against some invisible fury inside himself, or channeling some unearthly elements.
The spectacle was all around him, as the four other musicians were rather providing the momentum for his overwhelming despair and never-ending auto-crucifixion. Ruminating some wrath, he was staying still for long periods of time, looking at the crowd before exploding with a rare rawness and an endless torture. I am not exactly sure, they may have only played 3 or 4 songs, with the same violent intensity, the same thick sonic wall, indecipherable curious voices between the songs, and enough climatic assaults to keep you on the edge during the whole set.
The crowd was with them, it was a night with 4 different bands, no less, and I guess people were here to see the headliners Russian Circles, but some guys in the crowd were cheering up at the first riffs of their songs!
Deafheaven’s performance was very dramatic, and Clarke was even more impressive and scarier when he was kneeling down, sounding like the wounded beast you see in horror movies, killed a million times and waking up each time with more strength, and with one aesthetic move after another one he was competing with a thunderstorm while their sonic distortion was cracking the earth in half.