[Netherlands]
The headliners. This band fucked me the fuck up. And I’m pretty resilient. The
crowd knew them. They were heavily made-up and costumed – horror-death imagery –
the lead was in some sort of mock-death crown. I don’t know how to describe it
but I sort of recognized it as having a history. Sometimes, they were silly, with
the keyboard rising and bending on its own with skeleton faces on it. There was
the same heavy background of staccato noise. But, in the end, they were really
intense. The lead singer yelled: “Come on Portland show me some fucking hate.” I
specifically love death/goth rap – and I have a really high tolerance for this sort
of thinking. Somehow, this band destroyed me – maybe, sorry to be a whine, because my dad’s death is imminent– although, relistening to th
em online, I’m not so
sure – they are intense and convincing. One of their songs said something like,
“Imagine you’re nine – you find your mom’s wrists vertically cut.” Intense … maybe
therapeutic for someone who’s been through it? So, true to Dara, I started thinking,
of course, the hardest people music-wise, scene-wise tend to to be the softest
people person-wise. And then they comforted me with a dancey number. But then
they segued into real fairytales, dark romanticism – it reminded me of how Marilyn
Manson riffs on dark Willy Wonka imagery. Super creepy, super disruptive of
what we believe in and love, intentionally for sure. He started singing with a
microphone that was made of a pelvic bone and spine, and, for the first time in
my life, I found it super offensive that they were dramatizing death. Sure, it’s
easy to be abstract and artistic about it when it’s not real for you. I have no
doubt early childhood traumas drive all of this man’s art. In the end, I’m the
problem. I walked out crying because parents dying are harder than I expected. Listening
to this band to write this review, I can still see that they are amazing.
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