Blood and Glitter
Started: 2024-10-02 19:44:47
Submitted: 2024-10-02 21:48:58
Visibility: World-readable
Seeing a metal band from Eurovision live on stage
My two favorite bands from Eurovision last year were Australian prog-metal band Voyager, with their song "Promise" and German goth-metal band Lord of the Lost, with their song "Blood and Glitter". (Apparently Eurovision voters don't share my tastes because this year there was a profound shortage of guitar rock.) I dove into both bands' catalogs and developed an appreciation for each of them. At some point early this year I happened to notice that Lord of the Lost had a show scheduled in Los Angeles at the end of September, with no other dates on the west coast. I briefly considered flying to Los Angeles to see the band (it's not far) until I noticed that they had a show in New York two weeks earlier and I figured they were going to fill those two weeks with other shows between New York and Los Angeles; and soon I saw that they had in fact booked a date in San Francisco so I bought a ticket and put it on my calendar for the distant future.
That distant future finally came to pass this weekend, on Saturday night after we picked apples and staged an apple tasting. After supper I headed to the show at The Independent on Divisadero in Nopa, around the corner from Alamo Square. This neighborhood is far enough from the rail transit in the city that I don't think I've actually been there before. (I took a 5-Fulton bus to get there from Market Street.)
The opening band was Beasto Blanco. I knew nothing about this band before they appeared on stage; I hadn't even gotten around to listening to any of their music or or watching any of their videos. They turned out to be a hair metal band, with a woman singing backup vocals wearing a costume that looked like it could have been body armor from a 1980s sci-fi action movie, who stalked out on the stage with her back turned to the audience then very deliberately plucked a cordless mic out of a holster on her hip opposite a raccoon tail. She spent much of the set dancing around stage with a variety of props, including what looked like a small baseball bat with nails sticking out of it; a pole that looked at times like a scepter or a pike; and a mannequin arm with conduit and wires hanging out of shoulder. The band played energetic metal and the audience was into it, which is about the best case scenario for a band I didn't look up in advance. At the end of their set, the lead singer told us that their drummer had auditioned by sending videos on Instagram of himself drumming to the band's songs, which I guess proves that sometimes it's worth taking a shot.
After an intermission, the headline band took the stage in a sonic explosion and launched into their energetic set. (The music was loud even through my earplugs.) I started the set standing in the audience close to the stage, and I worked my way a bit closer to the stage throughout the set. I was close enough that I could see "Chris" written in marker on a strip of tape stuck to the in-ear monitor receiver the frontman wore at his waist.
I had listened to their last several albums over the past week in an attempt to prepare for the concert, and I recognized most of the songs (and tried to sing along to some of them). The crowd clearly liked the music and danced along to the band, and we fed energy onto the stage in a virtuous cycle.
Frontman Chris Harms stalked back and forth along the front of the stage, jumping up on the monitor speakers and leaning out over the audience crowded up to the stage. More than once he reached out to grab a hand raised in the the air and hold it for a couple of bars. Near the end of the show he picked up a phone that someone was using to record video and carried it onto the stage, singing right into the camera, then returning to the edge of the stage so he could lean down and film himself at the same time as the owner of the phone. This was more interaction than I'd seen between the band and their audience, and I wasn't sure if this was normal for the band (there's a note of playfulness beneath their performative gothic seriousness), or if they were enjoying playing the last show of their US tour.
"We were told that we couldn't be a real metal band if we had a synthesizer," the frontman said said in the middle of the show, gesturing at the stage behind him, "so we have two."
The band finished the show (and their US tour) with "Blood and Glitter" and "One Last Song", then the frontman left the stage. I got close enough to the stage to high-five the musicians as they walked along the edge of the stage, which was a neat end to a great show.
The show got out just before midnight, and then I had to get home. (When I go to a late show in San Francisco I often stay the night in the city, but this time the hotels were more expensive than I felt like paying.) Google Maps told me that I should head south to the Haight and catch a night bus, but they didn't seem to know about the 6-Haight bus that was waiting at the light to cross Divisadero when I arrived at the intersection, nor that the light timing would allow me to cross and reach the bus stop just ahead of the bus to pick me up and whisk me inbound to Civic Center. I caught BART to Daly City, then I had to get gas before driving down the peninsula and over the mountain to Santa Cruz. I finally got to bed at 02:15, and then I was awakened at 02:47 when a 4.2-magnitude earthquake near Watsonville kicked off the Shake Alert on Kiesa's phone, announcing "earthquake expected". Neither of us felt anything (though the earthquake was just big enough that we would have felt it had we been awake). It was not the sort of rock-and-roll I thought I would experience when I headed to the metal show.
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