My First Time – Supersonic, Thursday, November 5
French audiences are notoriously timid but they were fully alert for the Bristol quartet My First Time. Isaac Stroud-Allen, a boyish figure with insolent energy, waded into the crowd as he told everyone to get down–literally, making the room crouch at his will. For the last song, he invited people onstage—“Let’s make it safe… ish”— invoking a spill-your-beer-and-step-on-your-neighbor’s-foot type of letting go. Fans chanted for an encore (which didn’t happen), and then transitioned into a full-throated “Tout! Le monde! Déteste la police!” (Translation: “Every! One! Hates the Police!”)
bed – La Mécanique Ondulatoire, Saturday, November 7
The four-piece hailing from Tokyo is led by hyperactive frontman Une, who produces delightfully spastic dance movements that are further enlivened by the band’s twitchy sound. On stage, he cralwed, jogged in place, and arched his back like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix; at one point he started speaking into a landline telephone with a disconnected cord. Like My First Time, bed too matched the city’s freak, like something pent up had been released. The last songs of the set quickened into a techno-tinged, post-punk fury, toggling between anarchic frenzy and danceability.
PISS, photo by Titouan Massé
PISS – Supersonic, Saturday, November 7
PISS really unbolted too. The Vancouver band combines music and sound collage with performance art, blurring the personal and political while explicitly addressing gender, violence, and militancy. “I spent my life learning the right way to scream so people would listen,” screamed Taylor Zantingh in “i wanted to be a singer.” Her jagged, hyperventilating breath as she paced the stage was raw to the point of uncomfortable—more exorcism than performance, more war cry than song. A recording later announced, “The law isn’t working,” tapping into the idea that radical action is the only way to campaign for liberation. Or as Zantingh later put it: “Some people only believe you when your knees are bleeding.”
