Egrets On Ergot At Vacation Vinyl, Sunday September 6th 2015 Review

Egrets on Ergot

Egrets on Ergot, what kind of name is that? I immediately visualized a sort of angry bird, the rooster kind, but who am I to make fun of bands’ names? however he name was intriguing enough to check their set at Vacation Vinyl on Sunday night. Their equipment had taken a lot of room inside the tiny store, which hosted a secret Refused show about four months ago… and since that time,I try to check their Tumblr more often.

Egrets on Ergot were worth the short trip to the store, they had a very dark and tortured sound, even raw on the edges, with a tendency toward chaos, experimentation and dissonance, a post-punk-deathrock sound, which was entirely filling the store. But the main attraction was their frontman, Adam Brooks, a thin and agile guy on vocals and sax – an original addition for a punk/post-punk band if not for skronk or no wave, probable antecdents – who was climbing everywhere, using at his advantage the small space the store was providing, while taking the best hardcore-punk pauses ever. There was angst and violence into their music, but also humor (between the songs,) but the melodic guitar and bass duo played by Heather Galipo and Daniel Munoz, backed up by Matt Sherin’s relentless drumming were barely covering Brooks’ screams.

I spotted a Bauhaus t-shirt in the crowd, and it took me a while to make the connection, but this is much more obvious when you stream one of their tracks at home. Live, the deathrock part sure transpired at each song but the attention was entirely on restless Brooks who seemed to yell to the nothingness, and whose antics reminded me one of these hardcore punk singers,… and I can only imagine what kind of frightening acrobatics this guy is capable of in a larger concert venue, and the crowd violence that may follow.

At the end, Egrets on Ergot didn’t sound like anything I had heard before, they were hard to pigeonhole with their bits of horror punk, a frenzy of assaults, constant changes of rhythms, fierce accelerations, lugubrious sax injections and nightmarish vocals, which had some occasional Pixies accents. It was a very gloomy, like inspired by some tortured demon Brooks seemed to possess inside his skinny body. He even beat the hell of a metal bar at one point, may be to exorcise this devil inside, or this intense pain which made him kneel on the floor, or twist his body in impossible positions, still holding his sax. An abrasive sound for the very alive deadlock scene.

More pictures of the show here