Live Again

Wrapping up the year in live music

In this intro paragraph I would normally hype up the latest episode of Lamniformes Radio, however an unexpected power outage in western Seattle forced my hand. No new episode this week, but a very large two part episode will be on its way soon. Now, onto the meat of the matter.

Old habits die hard. And so it is that in the month of December, despite no one pressuring me to do so, I must re-cap the year. At the time of writing we’re 24 hours removed from Spotify taking over all of my social media feeds with its beloved/be-hated Spotify Wrapped feature. Spotify Wrapped, if you’re unfamiliar, is basically an individualized year-in-review in which Spotify shows you what songs and artists you listened to the most through cutesy infographics designed to be shared and compared with friends. As a marketing tool it’s pretty ingenious, although it’s become a lightning rod for the usual complaints about streaming writ large. If you’ve read anything about streaming you probably know the gist of those complaints by now. Instead of offering those up I’ll try and give you a slightly wonkier complaint.

Put simply, quantity of listens does not map cleanly onto the quality of the listening experience. This is especially true for weirdos like me who do not use Spotify as intended, but I think it’s probably applicable to the general public as well. Would you call the meal that you ate most frequently this year the best food that you’ve eaten? As much as I love stats and data there is a great deal that they do not capture about the experience of being alive. So if I’m going to indulge myself with a good ol’ End of Year write up I’m going to do so without ranking or declaring anything to be “the best” of the year. Instead I want to dive right into the messiness of the unquantifiable.

It’s hard to think of a better place to find messiness than the world of live music. In my particular milieu attending a concert is a largely gross experience. The floors are sticky, the air is humid, the people next to you are at the very least sweaty and any time the house lights are up the decor ain’t much to look at. All of this can be charming in its own way, but objectively it is not what an average person would describe as pleasant.

Everyone involved with any aspect of live music knows this to be the case, and yet for the majority of the last two years I’ve found myself waxing nostalgic and yearning for those musky environs in all of their unhygienic glory. The last public outings I had before New York locked down were a concert that I played (a Blink-182 cover set for the Bernie Sanders campaign while it was clearly on its last legs) and a concert I attended (Haunted Horses and Filth Is Eternal at Saint Vitus). During lockdown I wrote about how much I loved mosh pits and about the rise of live-streaming concerts. Along with much of the musical world I eagerly anticipated the return of live music. I even found myself wistful about loading in and out of venues. So of course once vaccinated and able I took many chances to watch music live in person again.

I first broke the seal with an outdoor concert at The Tradesmen where three-time Lamniformes Radio guest Frank Meadows played selections from his upcoming solo album. As far as soft re-openings go, I couldn’t have asked for a better one. An outdoor show in the summer sun with an intimate crowd of friends alleviated just about every COVID-related concern that I had about the return of live music. Frank played great and after the music ended we smoothly transitioned to pleasant conversation and frozen cocktails. Hard to find a single thing to complain about here.

Next up, at the behest of Infinity Shred guitarist and Between the Buried and Me live sound engineer Nathan Ritholz I purchased a last minute ticket to see an evening with BTBAM at Gramercy Theater. Coincidentally I had published a roundtable episode of Lamniformes Radio with Siddhu Anadalingham and Andrew Noseworthy about BTBAM the very same day that they were playing in New York City. In that episode we talked about how the three of us felt lukewarm about the band’s recent music and our sense of alienation from their current fanbase. I’m not sure if Ritholz knew this when he asked on my post about the episode if I planned on attending that night, but I decided to take him up on the occasion as a way of putting my money where my mouth was.

This was my first time experiencing the true “new normal” of live music. Looking around the room I quickly realized I was one of the only attendees wearing a mask full time. Moreover I had not yet readjusted to the lack of personal space that comes with show going. Even before the rush towards the front I kept maneuvering out of the way of anyone who got too close to me, which gradually pushed me today the back of the room. The show itself was a lot of fun, especially considering that the band threw in a few old tunes as a bone to the elder millennials, but these minor points of social friction stopped it short of being the cathartic homecoming that I had dreamt of a year prior.

I found some of the catharsis I was looking for at the show next, a hardcore gig at Le Poisson Rouge featuring Knocked Loose and Gatecreeper. I watched from a distance with a warm smile on my face as one of the opening bands requested and then received a pile on at the front of the stage. I like listening to studio recordings of hardcore, but the genre is meant to be experienced live, with other people, and loudly.

Gatecreeper and Knocked Loose have both been accused of being unoriginal bands, regurgitating the sounds of early 90s death metal and late 90s metalcore respectively. These criticisms have always felt toothless to me. First of all, neither band actually sound like they’re from the 90s. They may write similar music to those genres in those eras, but they use musical equipment and recording technology that would blow their stylistic forefathers minds. More importantly, I don’t think it actually matters if these bands are “unoriginal”. When Metalsucks criticizes Knocked Loose for sounding too much like Cave In and claims that their fans are “too young to know any better” they completely miss the point. If they actually valued Cave In’s contributions to the genre they’d be glad that younger generations are able to experience the style live to this day, not just from an older band but one that they grew up with. The pressure to constantly innovate on the form ignores that the genre is meant to be experienced socially and in person. I’m exactly old enough to have seen Cave In live during their heyday and to still be young enough to enjoy seeing Knocked Loose in person, and I was absolutely on the older end of the audience at LPR. I’m glad the kids have a Cave In-like to mosh to because Cave In riffs are great. Hardcore is folk music, stop trying to crush it into a commodity.

Appealing to the opposite end of my taste buds, I then caught Brooklyn’s own Office Culture at Mercury Lounge late night show. If you’ve kept up with Lamniformes Radio over the last year or so you’ve probably noticed that I’ve developed an interest in the aesthetics of smoothness. Not the modern “Spotify pop” version of smoothness, but the older 1970s version. Its why I spent an entire episode talking about Steely Dan and why I asked both True Blossom and Ryo Miyauchi about the millennial interest in genres like city pop. Office Culture fit right into this aesthetic wheelhouse, what with their propensity for jazz harmony and fretless bass playing. Unlike hardcore, this style is one that feels most at home on a studio recording where every element can be balanced just-so. The appeal of seeing it live is in watching a group of musicians play so well that the live show feels as spotless and controlled as the studio version.

In the back of my mind I considered all of this to be a warm up for my return to Saint Vitus. On the same day that I caught Dune in IMAX I made the trip out to Greenpoint to see Imperial Triumphant. I would have also seen Couch Slut and Pyrrhon at the same show but I had left my phone, which housed both my ticket and my proof of vaccination, at home. This meant I needed ride literally the full length of the G train before I could enter the venue. While I’m sad that I missed the openers I have to admit that an anxious and over-long trek on the MTA is a spiritually appropriate stand-in for their noisy grim-caked version of metal.

I made sure my next visit to Vitus to arrive early, this time to catch Glorious Depravity and Artificial Brain before Inter Arma. I know that I promised earlier that I wouldn’t declare anything to be ‘the best’ in this post so I’ll instead say that this was the most show-like show I went to in 2021. By which I mean that not only was the music good but that being there featured all of the distinctive elements of a night at the gig.

First the music: Glorious Depravity write great death metal songs that don’t require a backlog of familiarity with the genre’s knotted family tree to appreciate. Artificial Brain added a lot of local color (their jokes about chopped cheese went over great, their assertion that Lynch’s Dune was better did not), and Inter Arma capped off the night with a set rich in dynamic detail and sonic density.

Vitus itself was equally dense, but with people. I couldn’t turn a corner without running head first into someone I knew either through going to shows, the internet, or from my time in Chicago. I traded lines with other music critics. I watched a Youtuber get rockegnized. There was even a trip to a second location with friends afterwords. New York is back, baby!

One of the last people I ran into at the Inter Arma show was Ashley Levine of Thin, who was handing out fliers for his show at Gold Sounds with Juan Bond, Under The Pier and Inertia. I respected his commitment to the ground game and the mathcore shows in the scene have always been a fun hang since I’ve moved back to Brooklyn. This one continued the streak, and even got filmed by hardcore videographer Hate5Six.

Despite being a good time, this show offered my first run in with a COVID scare. A few days afterwords I got a text from a friend warning of a potential exposure from coworker with a positive case. Luckily we all came back negative from our tests as far as I know, but this burst the bubble of my rediscovered comfort with live music.

I’ve still made a point to see more shows, for example I just caught my friend Daniel Muller and his band Wilderun who are on tour with Swallow The Sun right now and I have plans to see Stuck at Trans Pecos this weekend, but it’s gotten harder for me to avoid the feeling that things are not quite right. Tours both large and small are at risk of stopping dead in their tracks if there’s a COVID breakout. Anecdotally I’ve noticed a higher frequency of touring bands posting about stolen gear. Rooms are getting oversold to make up for lost profits leading to even more potential damage from a possible outbreak, not to mention all of the other health risks associated with packing a lot of people into a small space.

Those last two are exacerbations of things that were already present in live music. Gear theft is an unfortunate riff that bands of any size need to prepare for, and venues are unfortunately always going to be incentivized to oversell in order to turn a profit in a precarious industry. The thing about precarious industries is that you only need to push them slightly to have them feel much worse.

During the lockdown in 2020 when I’d talk to other musicians one of us would frequently express some optimism about returning to a new improved live music ecosystem. Like a lot of the wishing that running smack into the wall of a global pandemic would force society at large to take a step back and reconsider a few things, this optimism has not born fruit. Instead it feels like business as usual at the “make stuff worse” factory.

The acts I’ve mentioned above are the way that I’m going to remember live music on a personal level, but on a larger scale the first name that will come to mind when I think of 2021 in live music is Travis Scott. Scott was the headliner and central attraction at the Astroworld festival, titled after his 2018 smash-hit record of the same name. On the festival’s first day 10 people died in a crowd crush that also injured hundreds more. In the wake of the tragedy fingers have pointed in every direction, many blaming Scott himself for not stopping the concert, the festival’s organizers were blamed, rightly, for not preparing adequately for the size of the crowd and potential risks, others scapegoated the devil, and most annoyingly people ranging from inconsequential metal boomers on twitter to gosh darn Pitchfork dot com blamed rap fans for not knowing the “rules of the pit.”

Scott is an easy target since, well, it’s his festival but really by the time he hit the stage it was too late to make up for the shoddy logistics that put the crowd in danger to begin with. Blaming the fans is a total low blow, the stuff of cultural elitists and socially maladapted weirdos. Live music will only improve if we stop blaming its flaws on the people on stage or the subculture on the floor and start digging into the way the whole business is set up. Obviously this takes a lot more work, but that work is worth it if we don’t want to live in a present that looks like Travis Scott at Astroworld and future that looks like Travis Scott in Fortnite.

So live music, good to see you again, but hoo boy could you use a makeover.