Photos & Text by Charles Nickles
Sometimes, you’ve got to kick it with the nihilists.
Throw that Judeo-Christian compass straight into the trash and burn it for the billions (dead and gone and on-and-on) succumbed to it’s foul entrapment shouting “TO FUCK WITH THE MORALITIES OF FEAR! I AM BECOMING! I AM HERE!” and with your exclamations feel the universe shudder its fabric and welcome your objection like a siren song until soon the nothing and the all meet in one glorious collusion of empathy.
Or, you know, you COULD just go to the riot show right over the bridge where Anatomy and Lingua Ignota and Dreamcrusher and Uniform (and sweet shit is this a hot ticket) are all primed to loose the artful violence tonight.
Yeah, maybe that would be best
You’ve never been too good with fire.
Anatomy
So, yeah. I missed Anatomy on account of getting some misinformation about set times and normally I’d just glom right over the artist’s inclusion in this set, but I was actually really looking forward to the redline howl of industrial wind.
Dreamcrusher
So the funniest part of seeing Dreamcrusher is that I didn’t hurt myself while they pummeled the audience with noise in the dark, nor when the strobes kicked and the bodies started reacting, nor when they weaponized their own flesh with screams and beats and took on the audience as one big violent lover at one point getting hold of my scarf, cinching it tight and taking me along the floor for a particularly intimate ride. No. I got through that just fine. I fucking hurt myself at the end of the night when one hug turned into them hoisting me and then me hoisting them and in my arms they were screaming R. Kelly at the top of their lungs and flailing wings and it was all fun and exalted and drunk until I felt a very sudden and unmistakable ping in the small of my back.
Now I feel like an old man.
Lingua Ignota
Lingua Ignota’s M.O. is the morgue by way of Diamanda in the early days of her crucifixion when I was young (too young) and as enamored with her beauty as I was with the power of her grip (seriously…shake her hand some day). Less operatic, perhaps. Lingua doesn’t play up the full plague masks but she does creep fast in the shadows of the red death. Bellowing, biting. Intoning the horrors of the flesh condemned to suffer the masculine/feminine.
Uniform
I thought that Uniform was a duo as angry and angular bros who beat synthetic rackets with an icy scowl and some tired post retro neologism, and maybe they do when they’re waxed and I can safely say I like that all right – but tonight, man. Tonight they were electrifying. More punk than that white junk the leather cads are STILL snorting as truth, about as metal as Broadrick maligning the palatial strains of aging for the blast beat batshit of his ill-defined youth and somehow, someway, 100% straight American rock n roll well-orchestrated reckless a la Kiss a la Prince a la NIN with the fire and the fury and the riffs and the painted pose before the pit.
And I loved it.
Total reckless dynamics and fists to the prick and is that the beast from the beast from The Exorcist they keep flashing on screen? That fucker’s face has plagued me since I was sixteen.
