A chaotic night with Daughters

Riding the wave of their critically acclaimed You Wont Get What You Want (2018), Daughters put on a show last December to a mostly packed Fillmore stage, a medium sized venue that fit a few hundred people, all of whom were buzzing and bouncing in place in feverish anticipation. The crowd was mostly composed of teens — most likely there after the glowing Anthony Fantano review — and older listeners who seemed to have been following Daughters since their Canada Songs (2003) album.

Their setlist was composed mostly fromYou Wont Get What You Want with a few songs and bits from their self-titled album and Canada Songs. The songs sonically resembled much of the studio recordings with the bands being able to pack in the same frenetic energy and heavy tones, never missing a beat in their hour-long set. The performance ranged from atmospheric songs with a heavy oppressive drone to chaotic songs with relentless, abrasive waves of noise that are constantly shifting to keep the listener in perpetual discomfort. While the instrumentals were by all means perfect, the most memorable parts of the show were the antics of vocalist Alexis Marshall.

Matching the theatricality and dramatics of the album, Alexis put on an equally dramatic performance screaming and wailing into the microphone while flailing and stumbling about the stage and into the audience. Seemingly guided by some psychic automatism, he would smash the microphone into his head — leaving a bloody bruise — brandish the microphone stand with his teeth and dive headfirst into the audience. At one point, him and the bearded man to my left shared a tender yet angry kiss. The combination of his violent convulsions, snarling spit-filled howls, and challenging stare gave him the semblance of a rabid dog rather than that of a person. His chaotic performance left everyone in the room hypnotized, unable to take their eyes off of him. His infectious, uninhibited energy slowly probed the crowd more and more to an increasingly feral side of themselves as the show went on. People, young and old, were stage diving into the crowd — much to the chagrin of the venue staff — and the mosh pit stretched a quarter of the venue at the sonic peaks with “The Flammable Man” and “The Reason They Hate Me.” Bystanders at the end of the opener, slowly swaying side to side with a cup in their hand, were completely sweat drenched and bug eyed at the end, yelling for more as the band made their slow march off stage.

Where many bands in Daughters’ genre fail to put on an audiovisual performance, Daughters excel. The roaring instrumentals and frantic presentation of grotesque existential lyrics work together to make a truly harrowing haunted house of an experience.

Article by Vivian Kim