At home in the crowd: Iceage and The Black Lips

On Friday night, I was welcomed into the Great American Music Hall by the Surfbort’s lead singer’s political outcry: “fuck Trump, fuck white supremacy, fuck rapists.” I felt immediately at home. Blue eyeshadows, unbuttoned shirts, and a blatant revival of 80s punk: Surfbort were outrageous, shameless and ridiculously electrifying. A few questionable statements later (along the lines of: “when you wanna make out but you’ve got bed bugs, so you do it anyway”), they left the stage after singing about “having a [panic] attack, having a [panic] attack,” half of the crowd cheering in support and the other half cheering in confusion.

Iceage took the stage soon after. Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, the lead singer, walked carelessly towards the microphone with his signature wet hair, beer in hand, and a white shirt tucked in high-waisted pants. Opening with “Hurrah,” the first track of their new, remarkable album, Beyondless (2018), they lured the crowd towards the stage, the room now getting warmer, energy permeating from every corner. There was no security, and no barriers. People were bouncing one against the other, over half of the crowd jumping in the mosh, pushing others, picking up the fallen ones, as Iceage played, never allowing a smile to show on any of their faces.

They then proceeded to play “Pain Killer,” but not before they introduced themselves with their usual minimalism: “we’re Iceage.” Then they jumped straight into the song, and the whole crowd joined them for the chorus, moving in synchrony from one side to the other, screaming at the top of their lungs “alright, alright, alright.”

Not much really happened during their set: they played every song with timeliness and diligence; there was barely any audience interaction, other than Rønnenfelt’s intense stares in the distance. However, the crowd was glowing with excitement: maybe it is exactly Iceage’s passivity and apparent indifference, an aesthetic of apathy, that enraptures the audience and demands for them to shake the earth’s grounds in an attempt to awaken them.

For “Lord’s Favorite,” Rønnenfelt began swinging, softly, drifting right by the heads of the people standing in the front row, hands up attempting to reach for the microphone, or for the sky. Again voices from the crowd cried out in unison: “I do believe in heaven and I do believe in hell.” Drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen led the rest of the band, the sound of his drums thundering in the room.

Time for the title song of their latest album, and the audience is in a rapture. A mosh pit opens again and sparks materialize generated by the friction between bodies; elbows make their way into the harmless fight and leave a few bruises along their tumultuous way. So Beyondless is played, and strangers in the audience smile at each other in a kind of complicity, maybe camaraderie, a shared euphoric eruption.

The unforgettable “Catch It” marks the end of their set, the whole room glimmering, reflecting the exhilaration it contained.  

A few minutes to breathe: as Iceage left the stage, the crowd loosened and scattered, allowing people to rest before The Black Lips. A white sheet with “Black Lips” spray painted in black on it drops from the ceiling, as shouts of excitement and trepidation signal the imminent arrival of the second headliners on stage.

And so they do, eventually, make it to the stage: a few trembling guitar strings tickled, and “Can’t Hold On” begins, crowd jumping, heads turning to look at friends in feverish joy. Jared Swilley, singer and bass player, also happened to be wearing a white shirt, tucked in his pants, but it was a large, oval buckle that called for all attention. Cole Alexander’s mullet was just as outrageous, only challenged for its magnificence by Zumi Rosow’s full black leather outfit, which, shining, reflected the golden hue of her saxophone.

“Modern Art” welcomed the first crowd surf of way too many. Although almost polished in recording, live anything from their 2011 album “Arabia Mountain” was but the opposite: raw, uncompromising and shamelessly loud. “Modern Art” turned out to be a riot. As the first person climbed on stage, jiggled for a few seconds and then jumped on the crowd, many prepared to follow suit, getting ready by the front row to leap on stage, high five any of the band members, and then let themselves go into the hands of the standing crowd.

On “Crystal Night,” with its bluesy twists, the audience danced, shook off their troubles, and let them go with a movement of the feet. But there was no time to waste: the song ended, and soon after “Oh Katrina!” took over, with its punk echoes and outrageous guitar solos. Counting the number of people who crowd surfed then would be impossible, like ants in a line they flowed from the stage, to the top of the crowd, to inside it again with no intermission: a cycle, a ritual. Needless to say, this song was devastating and purgative – we had just been given new life, and a few bones were surely bruised (here, I prayed for my rib).

They closed their set with “Raw Meat,” an old classic. Refusing to play some of the fan favourites, Black Lips brazenly opted for whatever they wanted to play, really. Roaring, defiant, casually singing about fresh onions and raw oysters, Black Lips gave it all, and we, the crowd, accepted it all and did all we could to make sure they knew (oh they knew) that we were grateful for what they were doing, whatever it is they were doing up there. Alexander jumped on the crowd, still playing his guitar, arms lifting him as high as they could before the end of the song.

They left the stage, blowing kisses, high-fiving as many people as they could, blessing them with their sweaty hands. I snatched a setlist, and an unopened water bottle: the feeling of home had not yet left.

Article by Marta Meazza, Photos by Mark Selden