November 2023: Slam Dancing in a Burning Building (Core Rulebook, 5e)
How to behave at gigs, Beyond The Redshift festival, and new albums from Sawce and Me Rex
Want some music to read along to? Jump to this month’s playlist on Spotify / TIDAL.
World (Gig) Police and Friendly Fire
Throwing glowsticks at Death Grips until they walk off stage and cancel the gig. Bringing your dead mother’s ashes to a Pink concert to present as a gift mid-performance. Forcing a cancellation of The Bodyguard musical by refusing to not sing over the cast. It would seem live audiences in 2023 are struggling to adhere to basic behavioural principles - and I’ve certainly seen my fair share of bad crowd behaviour too, with fans talking over sets, heckling, barging and engaging in other arsehole behaviour.
The obvious approach would be to opine on the state of live entertainment attendance and speculate on the causes of bad behaviour. “Gen Z have no idea how to behave!” “TikTok has rotted people’s brains!” “The pandemic has broken the rules of social etiquette!”. This seems pointless. Crowds have been variously shitty for the history of human civilisation - imagine snagging a ticket to see The Beatles in 1963 only to not hear any of the set over the screaming of teenage girls throughout, or even to witness Shakespeare’s latest play in Stratford over the heckling of drunks in the cheap seats. So instead, I’m just going to set out what the exact rules should be for audiences (and some bonus band/venue rules), given my (apparent) benevolent dictator aspirations and significant music scene clout*. Necessary to this endeavour (and a good “if in doubt” on the gaps here) is The Sign:
LIVE MUSIC: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Throw stuff to/at the band on stage: Hard no for anything that’s an injury risk - the days of throwing bottles can hopefully stay in the history books on the early punk scene and that one time Daphne and Celeste played Reading. Exceptions for fun non-injurious stuff, like silly inflatable balloons at a festival.
Throw your beer into your air: Sure, that shower of amber looks impressive from a distance. Generally less fun when you’re one of the folks getting covered in beer. Particularly if you’re worried it might not be beer. I dunno man, wouldn’t you rather drink it? It cost £8 or something, that could have gone in your cash ISA. On that note…
Urinate anywhere other than the toilets/portaloo: I refer you to The Sign.
Force your way to the front of the crowd: Everyone wants a good position to see from. I’m in a fairly privileged position being over 6 foot tall that at most gigs I’m going to have a good sightline. (Except Deafheaven - their London fans seem to have an average height of 6’ 5”.) Queuing for hours to make sure you have a spot at the front seems mad to me (and definitely stupid when weather conditions to do so are dangerous). But if you really care about being up close, then make the effort to get your spot early-ish at least and stick with it. If you have friends one of you can hold the spot. If you’re on your own that’s tougher - make some friends? If you are over six feet tall and there’s someone behind you weighing in at 5’ 2”, maybe let them go in front, it’s not gonna hurt you.
Personal hygiene: For God’s sake, shower once in a while. And know that, if you’re the super sweaty guy insisting on pushing through the crowd with your top off, everyone will hate you.
Moshing: Absolute staple of many a good gig. But as with all good things, there are Rules! Obviously, stop slamming about and help someone up if they fall down. Tie those shoelaces unless you want to be the person shouting “Anyone find a shoe?” at the end. Whatever you do, DO NOT open up a massive circle pit ten seconds before the song ends, or when transitioning into a very long quiet section. You make us all look like lemons and then the one weird guy insists on dancing in the middle whilst the guitarist is re-tuning and no-one wants that.
Some bands that support safe gigs for women and non-binary people (we should all support safe gigs for women and non-binary people) may ask the crowd to create space at the front for those groups, or to not get in the circle pit for a song/the set unless you identify as part of those groups. Follow those requests. Shout-out here to the excellent work of Safe Gigs For Women, Girls Against, and other grassroots organisations to kick out sexual harassment at live gigs.
Filming and photography: Of course you want a snap or a quick clip of the band playing for your scrapbook socials. Of course you don’t want to be the person who is stuck behind someone with their phone in your eye-line blocking the view for most of the set. Unless you brought an SLR and photographer credentials, whatever you capture is gonna be a little dodgy in quality at best. Maybe try and enjoy the moment more than try to capture it with a shitty 8MP phone camera and tinny microphone.
Filming and photography using a Nintendo 3DS: Is it a chiptune gig? If not, you’re a weirdo.
Filming yourself using a Nintendo 3DS to film the band with your phone: I can’t believe I had to write that sentence. You’re not some 21st century Andy Warhol. Enjoy the gig, go and desecrate the Coliseum or something if you want to get likes on social media.
(Band) Demand people seal their phones away during the gig: When you get to a certain size it’s hard to not end up with a bunch of arseholes ruining the vibe by watching the show through their phones the whole time, so I sympathise. If you’re big enough that the main rationale is revenue protection then you’re definitely big enough to not really need revenue protection to continue your comfortable music career.
Crowdsurfing: Lamentably I’ve never partaken. Recommend giving your mate everything in your pockets first (anything you keep on you will be lost). Give the folks near you a heads-up before your leg smacks them in the face.
(Venue) Ban crowdsurfing: Killjoys.
Etiquette for when the singer/guitarist comes into the crowd: As with driving, keep your movement predictable to avoid a guitar headstock in the eye. As with other people’s pets, don’t just grab or touch them unless there’s clear consent. Definitely don’t give the singer an impromptu rectal examination as they’re crowdsurfing (as I saw Justin Hawkins subjected to when seeing The Darkness in 2013).
Talking with your friend mid-set: Keep it brief and ideally between songs. “This band is great!” can be conveyed with a nod and a thumbs-up. Quick logistics and any welfare check-ins are obviously fine. Having a loud conversation about something entirely different can surely wait until you’re somewhere you haven’t paid for a ticket to be at. Also there’s no way your friend is gonna hear you over that wall of sound and through their earplugs. (You’re wearing earplugs, right? Hearing loss is no joke.) And please shut up during the quiet acoustic number. Kudos to crowd members shushing others in these cases, you folks are the real ones.
Buying merch pre-show: Buy merch whenever you want! But trust me, that vinyl record is not gonna survive in the crowd, get yourself down to the coat check.
(Band) Put a dedicated cashless tipping point in the merch stand that gives to the band, not the merch folks: I mean, I’m British, I don’t understand US tipping culture, but this seems dumb. Just set up a Patreon or something?
(Venue) Enforce a 25+% cut on bands to sell their merch in your venue: Yeah man, go for it, but you have to give the band the same cut of bar sales. Wait, where are you going?
Heckling: Sometimes a band has a bad day. Sometimes a band is just bad. Vote with your feet, not your mouth. Evaluating a band’s level of quick-wittedness is not a reason to yell abuse at them. Also it’s pretty pointless. If they are a small band then you’re probably just destroying their confidence and ruining their day doing their job. You wouldn’t want strangers shouting “you’re crap” at you whilst you’re struggling with the printer at your boring office job that you hope is gonna lead to that big move into middle management. If they’re a big band then nothing you say is going to make any impact on their success. In either case you look stupid.
Drunkenly interrupt the band mid-song to offer the guitarist £20 to stop the set and play blues songs instead: This highly specific example definitely isn’t a traumatic memory from a gig I played back in 2012. *sighs, taps The Sign*
From the Pit: Beyond The Redshift Festival (curated by Cult of Luna)
O2 Forum Kentish Town / The Dome / Boston Music Room, 20th October 2023
It’s taken two years from buying the tickets and 18 months since the 2022 edition was originally scheduled (cancelled due to the pandemic) but at last, Cult of Luna’s curated London festival has finally taken place, albeit with a slightly diminished line-up compared to the original (with no Alcest, Bossk, Svalbard, or A.A. Williams). Split across three venues around Kentish Town and Tufnell Park, it’s certainly a generous setup for music fans given the restrictions on capacity to accommodate all three venues, and the significant costs incurred - not least on security personnel, who spent most of the day attempting to do security pat-downs on every (re-)entry before giving up as the numbers swelled in the evening. The venues aren’t exactly proximate - it’s a good ten-minute uphill walk from the Forum to Tufnell Park, accommodated by scheduling 15-20 minute breaks between sets. And there’s definitely a missed trick in not setting up a few food trucks near the venues, with quick food options other than Maccies thin on the ground on that stretch of Fortess Road. (We ended up skipping a band and getting an excellent Indian meal near the Forum - with apologies to LLNN / Ştiu Nu Ştiu). Still - Cult of Luna could easily have shrugged, cancelled the whole thing or converted to just another UK tour date; given the quality on display, I’m delighted they chose not to.
My day started with the excellent Jo Quail, coming in at late notice for the absent Emma Ruth Rundle armed with just an acoustic cello c.1820 (no loop pedal shenanigans in this set). Not often a metal festival set will get bookended by performances of Bach preludes and feature some “Radio 3 contemporary classical music” cuts - and it’s a testament to her talent and the gameness of the crowd that these go over so well. Interspersed with a tease of the new album and some djent-style cello riffing, this was a delightful start to proceedings.
The volume was cranked a good 20 decibels or so by Norna, who deployed a crushing wall of riffs, splashy cymbals and savage growls and screams from Tomas Liljedahl, formerly of post-hardcore outfit Breach. This is slow, repetitive fare (in a good way!) - the riffs evolving over time and augmented by occasional blasts of synth.
The most emotionally vulnerable set of the day came from GGGOLDDD, a quasi-industrial four-piece led by Milena Eva. Think A.A. Williams by way of Nine Inch Nails, with the band members cycling between drum pads, guitars and various synthesisers to create a unique electronic sound to back those haunting vocals. Eva’s presence fronting the band mesmerises with a slow-paced choreography, with nary a dead moment amidst gesticulating arms and turns. The lyrical material itself is tough stuff, focusing in detail on her experiences with sexual assault - overwhelming both for the crowd and for Eva herself, who breaks down midway through the set before recovering bravely. It’s compelling but probably deserves a trigger warning for those where the resonances may be particularly raw.
Four sets in before we saw a bass guitar on stage - albeit a beautiful sparkling red number wielded with thunderous aplomb by frontwoman Isa Holliday of Belgians Slow Crush. Slow Crush play a heavy and varied form of “abrasive shoegaze”, masked within layers of fog that obscured any attempts to see the band or their stage banner for about 90% of the show. I quite liked the genre variations on offer and the ethereal dream-pop style vocals over big pounding riffs, but none of the songs particularly grabbed me - perhaps a fault of lack of familiarity on my part.
Second time seeing Svalbard in two months after their ArcTanGent performance, this time on the back of the release of new album The Weight Of The Mask. The formula here - Deafheaven-style blackgaze with dual vocal attack and serious hardcore drumming - never lets up, and those drums in particular are the secret weapon of the band, giving punk energy to the wall of sound in keeping with the lyrics of protest and outrage from frontwoman Serena Cherry. Indeed, the pace and power here probably need a mosh pit to be fully appreciated - a shame none have sprung up in either set from this year. Perhaps a headline show visit is required.
I was quite surprised and a little bemused when Napalm Death were announced on the bill. Long-time legends of extreme British metal, probably best known for their 1.3 second magnum opus You Suffer, their outspoken left-wing political stances and the surprising indulgences of sections of the music press that would otherwise never touch a blastbeat. I fully expected not to enjoy this very much - grindcore is a challenging genre prospect at the best of times, and my tolerance for more extreme metal is quite low.
It turns out that grindcore (or at least, the Napalm Death live experience of it) is a lot like watching Shakespeare; you need the first ten minutes to “get your ear in” before it starts to come together. The first three songs go by in a confusing blur of relentless screaming and speed playing, with the band belying their age to power the cacophony of noise. A couple of (relatively) slower numbers lend some more accessibility and the ability to recognise the talent on display, particularly the exceptional bass chops of Shane Embury, who steals the show at points with intense but never illegible bass riffing. Humorous and heartfelt proclamations from frontman Barney Greenway win over the parts of the crowd not up to speed with such fare as 1987’s Scum, advocating for trans rights and peace in the Israel-Gaza conflict. The biggest cheers are saved for the rendition of You Suffer, performed twice after (apparently) a lyrical mix-up on the first attempt. I’m not sure I’d recommend them to most, and it took some work to get into, but there’s enough here to see how such an acquired taste of a band has earned the acclaim it has over the years.
Headling The Dome were French post-hardcore outfit Birds In Row - a perfectly balanced power trio of hardcore punk energy, all shouty throated vocals, propulsive drums and cathartic guitar lines. Somewhere on the spectrum between Touché Amoré and La Dispute, blisteringly loud and fully demanding your attention on stage. Took a while to warm into personally (possibly with my ear coming out of Napalm Death mode) but I’ve been enjoying this a lot on rotation since the gig.
Onto headliners Cult of Luna - technically still on their tour supporting The Long Road North, though the setlist has expanded a little since their headline show at ArcTanGent in 2022. All the same ingredients are there - an incredibly full sound, backed by drums and a percussion suite, wall-to-wall heavy guitars and occasional attention-grabbing synth lines, and topped with the distinctive best-in-the-business screams from Johannes Persson. The light show is fantastic as well - no specific lighting rig brought along, but a huge amount of programmed work using the house tech to full effect. Set opener Cold Burn remains the recognisable highlight of their discography - a deafening bass synth roar punctuated by floodlights, evolving into dense percussion, soaring guitars and those immaculate screams. The rest is absorbing stuff, occasionally exhausting, and a lot of the set blurs together as you simply take in the wall of sound and energy.
On Rotation: Sawce and ME REX
Sawce - Life Is Temporary, Sawce Is Forever
Self-released October 13th, 2023
ME REX - Giant Elk
Released October 20th, 2023 on Big Scary Monsters
New Jersey’s Sawce first hit my radar with their Bedtime Stories EP four years ago. A delightful set of noodly instrumental math-rock songs, perfectly evoking the EP title’s end-of-day vibes and nostalgia, became a firm favourite record for me. As a self-released niche band project discovered through the Apple Music algorithm, often the expectation is that may well be the last you see of the band - projects spin up, put out a release or two, go dormant as members move to new projects or onwards with their lives. (See also - the fantastic No Drum and Bass In The Jazz Room by Clever Girl.) So it was with great delight on my part that Sawce have resurfaced four years on with a whole album of material.
With the wider canvas of an album, that consistency of tone of their previous EP has been supplanted with more adventurous fare. The noodly guitars and fretboard runs still permeate, but are now supported and often cede centre stage to a range of other influences and elements. There are heavy chiptune 8-bit synths throughout, particularly on the likes of Crunch and Emulate, successfully evoking that early Anamanaguchi sound. We also get Japanese anime soundtrack vibes to lead single Shonen and the Stardew Valley-esque Green Lane, comparable to the sort of melodic flourishes of otaku artists like Sithu Aye. Second single Rage Quit goes hard and fast with more traditional synth flourishes, bass guitar prominence and even some death metal breakdown flourishes on guitar and drums. The distortion is turned off in favour of the classical guitar shredding reminiscent of recent Polyphia on Strand until the last 25 seconds crank it back with a sickly strings crescendo.
Following up on EPs with albums is always a big step for any band. An EP can blow away easily with a tight selection of best material, no filler required. Similarly making the step up to first full (conventional) album is ME REX, hailing from London and Brighton and led by the enigmatic Myles McCabe. I’m on record as saying ME REX are among my favourite songwriters - their last two EPs chock-full of hooky indie-pop bangers with unabrasive odd time signature & polyrhythmic flourishes and intense lyricism. They in turn followed from their first full-length album Megabear, 52 songs of roughly 32 seconds apiece designed to played on shuffle and form a cohesive whole in any order. (I’m fascinated by Megabear, the technical achievement of putting something like that together, the bravery of making that your first album, and its structural limitations as near-infinitely replayable music, and will doubtless write about it properly at some stage.)
The ME REX transition to a conventional album starts very strong with the one-two-three combination of Infinity Worm (mixing the R.E.M. Monster sound with, well, a better song than anything on R.E.M.’s Monster), Eutherians (Ultramarine) and its push-pull escalation over a constantly moving melody, and the propulsive momentum of Giant Giant Giant. Stop it there and make it an EP and it’s as good as any of their previous releases. Instead we venture into new, introspective territory on the likes of Halley and Spiders, some varied textures firmly in the non-single variety of Oliver, and some cathartic showcasing of Myles’ secret weapon, the cracked vocal, as Pythons concludes. Jawbone alone reprises the “catchy single” energy of the early album with its pacey vocal delivery, with the band far more interested in playing with slow builds and evolving songs over those addictive hits of hooks. It’s an obvious direction to take, the kind of thing an album gives space for that an EP does not, and the quality throughout is inarguable, but the sheer strength of the early album hangs heavy over its middle and end stages without this listener ever feeling there is an inventive payoff to match the creativity of the band.
That step-up to an album is a great moment for a band and can be tackled in many different ways. Sawce have obviously evolved their sound over the past four years and revel in showing off some new directions and a wider sonic palette, though at the cost of the glorious atmosphere of their previous EP. ME REX have front-loaded their album with their EP-like material and then gone exploring for different and quieter song structural forms. Both have made excellent, enjoyable albums on their own merits! The constructional seams may show a little in both cases through comparison, but that’s just part of the evolutionary journey.
Sawce - Life Is Temporary, Sawce Is Forever :: Listen on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL
ME REX - Giant Elk :: Listen on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL