By Will Bishop
The campus lit up the fog overhead like a soft orange signal pulsing in a hazy gray. A lighthouse drawing in 16 new bodies from all across the world. From Montréal to Bangkok, four bands hailing from the furthest reaches of the world had found themselves here. Show Me the Body’s national tour was well underway when they decided to add one more date, Sept. 29, Kate Buchanan Room, Cal Poly Humboldt.
The crowd was thin amid the opening set from Canadian band Truck Violence. Still, they spared no quarter, filling the negative space with a maelstrom of negative-minded post-hardcore sludge that fits rather neatly into the incredible and actually real genre descriptor “pigfuck.” A lone jersey-clad mosher carried the anemic audience — windmilling and donkey kicking with energy and ferocity equivalent to around 40 people.
Following a brisk 20-minute set, Brooklyn-based digital hardcore outfit Lip Critic took the stage and proceeded to stomp it into the ground with a pummeling synth-driven performance. The most gonzo and colorful of the night’s performers, the quartet executed sample-driven synth-freakout mayhem on the back of a dual drummer percussion section. At one point frontman Bret Kaser strode out into the crowd, bisected it with a mic cord, then proceeded to swing the cord like a jumprope — audience members gleefully accepted the challenge.
Now, if you were starting to tire of all of the “post” and “digital” prefixes being assigned to your beloved hardcore, if you just wanted that straight-ahead no-caveats hardcore, Bangkok-based outfit Whispers was the band for you. It was certainly the band for our beloved Jersey Guy, who was throwing roundhouse kicks like he was fighting for his life in a Bruce Lee movie. A rather one-to-one vibe match for the large projection of kickboxing matches which backdropped the group. The crowd reached a fever pitch during this set, swelling and metastasizing into a grotesque mosh hivemind. In the words of lead singer Nitisart “Mike” Chaiburi, “This is a hardcore show who gives a fuck!”
Headliner Show Me the Body took the stage, met with rapturous applause and the aroma of countless very sweaty people. Frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt tore through the set with minimal banter, electing instead to focus on the screaming and the rapping and the distorted banjo playing. His intensity grew as the sheen of sweat on his face accumulated, stepping away from the mic and hulking around the stage like a glistening bald ape. Crowd members near the front sang along to nearly every word — barking out “Radical left, it compels me to fight!” on the bruising “Eat For Peace,” then chanting along to the mesmerizing alienation anthem “Arcanum.” This full-throated devotion proved that the band had indeed made the correct choice in making a little pit stop on the long road from Seattle to San Francisco.
Kaser, in a post-show interview, reminisced on the nostalgic qualities of playing college shows — Lip Critic having formed in 2018 during their time at the State University of New York at Purchase.
“I love playing colleges still because it’s like — it feels a little bit back to our DIYish roots where we used to just pull up to house shows, blow the PA and leave,” Kaser said. “So, as close as I can get to that. It’s always got some sentimental value.”
Kaser went on to espouse the importance of unity through music.
“Live music is all about being surrounded by a group of people that you feel like you identify with and you feel safe around and supported by,” Kaser said. “That’s kind of what we aim to do is like, have a space for catharsis and celebration. A place where we can kind of all unify against some real nasty bullshit that’s going on outside of the music venues where we have fun.”
Towards the end of Show Me the Body’s set, Pratt delivered something of a retroactive thesis statement for all that came before. Summarizing the night’s blistering atmosphere with one simple phrase.
“It’s all love.”
Bio: Will Bishop is a reporter and copy editor. He can be reached at wmb84@humboldt.edu or via dynamic encounter in the wild.