Bring Me The Horizon live at the Palladium, wowow
Sometimes, very occasionally, I forget that I live in Los Angeles, a town full of people vying for fame and fortune in several different sectors of the entertainment industry, and who are therefore extremely good-looking...and then I am reminded of it when I go to a show like Bring Me The Horizon at the Palladium yesterday. Holy smokes, gee whiz, awoooga, etc. etc. I will write about the band and their performance momentarily, but first I need to express how, uh, pulchritudinous the crowd at this show was.
L.A. overindexes on hotties as it is, but does metal and metal-adjacent music also produce more than its share of good-looking fans? Leather pants, artful piercings, eyebrows as thin as the parentheses in a particularly elegant serif typeface. Women who looked like they could kill me with their bare hands. Tattooed men who all kind of looked like Machine Gun Kelly.* Complex arrangements of miniskirts and tights that evoked the concept of Hot Topic getting into the commercial fishing business. And everyone in platform boots, so as I gazed upwards at these people, I felt like a supplicant to a pantheon of goth gods and goddesses.
The style brings me back to the music. Even though "metalhead" is not my first genre tag as a music listener, there's something about aggressive music and the fashion and aesthetics that flow from it that simply make me happy. A confluence of people who draw inspiration from the darkest, heaviest shit and make it a lifestyle...back in New York I would sometimes play a game called Alien where I would go for a walk and observe everything around me, pretending to be an alien who just came to Earth and was trying to figure out how shit worked. these people have many markings on their skin...they wear dark clothing emblazoned with art that looks foreboding, menacing...they seem to confer with a sinister underworld, and yet they walk among us calmly, purchasing foods from the food store...
Bring Me The Horizon! Wow these guys rocked. I knew just about nothing of their music, so I did one of my favorite things to do as a music blogger w/ the privilege of getting listed for shows—go in totally blind. And they were amazing. Their light show was quite powerful, and lead singer Oli Sykes looked quite sexy in a black tank top (I think more men should wear tank tops...please consider) as, between songs, he exhorted the audience to open up a circle pit ("come on you fucking pussies!"). The music to me had the yawping melodic tendencies of '00s pop punk/emo, but cranked to its heaviest limit. Lots of double kick drums, things of that nature. And yet there was also some electronic pizazz, even a cybergrind-y moment or two?
Oh and enormous shout out to the two dancers they had onstage for some of the time—they were wearing...priestly vestments? Chasubles? I am regrettably not up on my religious garb terms, but they had long draping panels with black crosses on them. And they were contorting themselves about and doing cheerleader shit. They were so awesome.
My favorite song was "Teardrops," which sounded like Linkin Park but darker (Linkin Dark), because the chorus had a shout-along moment that went "EVERYTHING IS SO FUCKED!" which everyone screamed.
The crowd was insane. Not sure if I have seen a crowd of this nature in a minute. Zombie apocalypse-style mosh pits, seething vortexes of human flesh. At intervals, arms or legs would pop up from the horde, like severed limbs in the aftermath of a horrible shark attack, before the rest of the crowdsurfer's body thankfully appeared. The best part of the show was seeing a woman achieve total crowdsurf flow state, coasting across the entire GA section in miniskirt and combat boots, shouting along all the words, no phone just vibes. Nothing makes me happier than watching people enjoy music—even, and maybe especially, if it's music I've never heard before. A subculture thrives in Los Angeles, spurred by an English band who has been together for over 20 years but still has the energy of young whippersnappers, god bless us (or curse us) every one.
*I wrote this because it was true, but also I was specifically thinking of one guy up in the balcony who was grooving to Bring Me The Horizon that made me think "wow, MGK vibes" and after checking the BMTH IG story this morning...it WAS Machine Gun Kelly! Cool.
Bring Me The Horizon have a live album, L.I.V.E. in São Paulo, out now, you can listen to it here.
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