The Danish band certainly generated a lot of buzz-blog-noise this past week, plus I read a Iggy Pop’s heartfelt endorsement when he was interviewed by the BBC –‘It's not easy to be that dark. A lot of people who try to express negative energy sort of just flail. They kind of come off like hamsters or something, where the more they try, the sillier it is. I thought they achieve a certain darkness – and it was enough to convince me to go see Iceage at the Echoplex on Friday night. First of all, the band consists of four heartthrobs looking extremely young,… how old are they exactly 20? 22 at the most, they looked like babies to me, but ouch! Everything I saw and heard couldn’t have been further from cute baby stuff. Iggy was right, they are dark, they are even masters of darkness, and I am still wondering where all this insurgent anger could come from at such a young age.
Call them punk, hardcore, post-hardcore, noise rock, I am not exactly sure, but singer-guitarist Elias Bender Ronnenfelt was certainly the center of my attraction, moaning, hurting, yelling, expressing violent feelings of pain and sadness with an attitude going from aggression to pure despair. That’s the point, if hardcore usually plays around tough aggression, Iceage was rather erupting with a romantic noirceur, mixing suffering with raging while installing an hellish depressive-state-of-mind on stage. And all the young people packed around the stage hadn’t certainly come to be cheered up, rather they began to aggressively mosh as expected. I stayed in the front for a few songs to get some close-ups, but soon left the crushing front rows with a certain regret nevertheless… It was much harder to have a good view of what was going on from the back of the room, but I can’t compete anymore with 20-something nose-bleeding guys expressing their angst with such physical conviction.
You will read a lot of Joy Division comparisons in critics, and it is understandable based on the pessimistic ambiance they installed during their short set, it would certainly be difficult to top it, but I don’t know if I totally buy the whole Hamlet in hell, I-am-the-new-Ian-Curtis nihilistic approach. May be they don’t want to be compared to the 70s English band, although they have certainly used the same black imagery, even going to the length of flirting with fascist gestures at one shows,… Fortunately, nothing like that last night, I wouldn’t have appreciated it at all! Rather a crowd surfing at mid-show, and a lot of this biting, pissed-off relentless punk, going faster or slower, showing no trace of hope anywhere. Their set was intense, the band had an undeniable gloomy stage presence, but I was looking for something to hang on, a few sentences? A half-smile? A grin? But I couldn’t find it, everything was dark for the sake of dark, cold for the sake of cold. For 40 minutes, Elias Bender Ronnenfelt bent over the crowd with his ferocious groans over some minimal post-punk and punk riffs, the noisy storm broke with songs from their two albums ‘New Brigade’ and ‘You’re Nothing’ (recently released on Matador records) and it was over… Already? Despite people shouting for more, they didn’t come back for a crowd-pleaser encore, they are simply not the type.