I promised I’d write this.
I swear.

I promised!


Otherwise, I’d be in bed by now. Comfortable, moist after a quick shower, warmed by the duvets, cradled by the pillows, thinking about relaxing my muscles.
Still, I’m not. I’m peering at the screen in the darkness, sipping my green tea, and listening to the ringing in my ears. And thinking back on that magical time at the pub.

Rewind a few hours, some dancing, bouncing, and several glasses of water, and you find me standing near the stage, watching the live band fumble their way up on the stage, I curse myself for letting them convince me to leave my camera at home.

The keyboardist looks up behind his black-rimmed glasses, his badly fitting t-shirt coasting down over his tight pants, painting the typical picture of a synth head. To the left edge of the stage, you see the guitarist, black dyed hair standing up in a carefully augmented and tended wilderness, with the matching attire of looking cool clothing. Slide your eyes to the back and you would see the drummer, looking like someone had rolled in a geek from high school and put a shirt on him, and strapped a fat plastic-metallic chain around his neck while they were passing a thrift store.

In the middle, the white cutoff t-shirt over dirty black jeans, and the bass in hands in front of the microphone is the musical genius of the band. Front and centre, the highlight of the show, wearing tight pants to show off her curves, a golden shimmering bra and an open shirt hanging loosely down. With a huge crucifix gathered from the same thrift store, shoved with one end down into said shimmering bra and her hair pulled back to avoid it sticking to the carefully plastered face, is the singer herself.

Welcome, to Diskoteket, live on stage.

As the show(?) starts, I look up, and I’m unable to stop myself from grinning like a fool when I hear the two lines that pretend to be the lyric being sung. Sung is not the right word. Tortured from the fragile remains of the plastic replants that replace her vocal chords, may well be the right term. She fails to hit a single tone on the way up, and seems intent of never catching a single one the whole time she stays on stage. The lyrics are simplistic, in fact, three words, in three different combinations, with a couple of “how could you?” stashed in between. Indeed, how can you do anything when it all falls apart, the words lost their meaning from being nonsensically repeated time after time, and fortunately for them, they never had a context to be taken out of.

Now turn your eyes to find the bassist, who is enthusiastically repeating the two, maybe four, chords he knows, without heed or care for what the others are doing, sometimes breaking off a chord to lean in and wail something inaudible in the general direction of the microphone.

Slide your eyes further right, and you catch the keyboardist beating his marvellously fabric-tuned instrument with his index fingers, hands clenched to fists, tongue sticking out at the corner of his mouth.

Move your eyes back behind them to the drummer, and marvel at how much noise he can generate from the poor drum set without managing to keep the same rhythm as himself, nor anyone else in the band, while looking so remarkably bored and confused.

Sliding your eyes to the left, you see the guitarist struggling, his fingers jamming in between the strings, his hair on end, sprayed into a solid gravity defying mass as he attempts to wring tortured chords out of an instrument that clearly doesn’t like him.

At this point, I’m unable to stop my laughter. I’m standing at the front row, laughing like the madman I am, unable to do anything but laugh, look, and attempt to breathe.

Halfway through the song the guitarist blows a string, and ends up standing there, unable to continue to torture his poor instrument. The band takes a brief break as he’s sitting on the stage, attempting to string the poor creature, without any luck. After a few minutes, the audience grumbles, and the brave band decides to continue. Our guitarist fails completely at his work of stringing the maliciously uncooperative instrument, and ends up handing it to a friendly soul in the audience who seems to have at least half a clue on how to get the string to actually stick to the instrument.

For the next two songs, the guitarist sits at the edge of the stage looking cool. And nobody misses him. Well, maybe the keyboardist does, because at some point he grows bored and starts beating his keyboard with a drumstick as well as his index fingers. Then again, maybe not.

After this, our brave hero, the guitarist, gets his instrument back. The new string in place, and completely out of tune with anything where it’s supposed to be. This does not deter our hero, who wails out chord after chord to mix into the horrifying cacophony of the band. At some point our dear singer forgets her shirt somewhere with the lyrics, and ends up repeating her first song lyrics over and over again while she pours water down her now naked arms.

Meanwhile, I’m laughing. Unable to stop myself, unable to bring breath, I curse myself for not having my camera, and continue to laugh. At some point I was considering that maybe in fact they were the genius of energy that they were announced to be, the powerful completion of defining the genre, that in fact their atonality stemmed from them following a pentatonic scale, unfortunately this would never be the case due to the finger-jabbing keyboard stabbing that produces perfectly tuned notes in the diatonic scale.

Towards the end, when the singer was done berating the audience for hiding in the back, when the party of five that I came with had dissipated and fled the horrors they could not appreciate, there was an applause. We were standing, clapping and hollering, because they promised it would be the last song. As the last slam of the drums came to pass, the singer’s wailing voice was drawn to an end by the lack of air in her lungs, we shrugged and moved on, getting something to drink and hoping the DJ would start so this could be banished to a point in history.

Yet, I cannot stop laughing.

This, my friends, is the promised review of the most horrifying display of atonal terror I have yet to see, and I’ve seen third-grade kids doing “we are the world”. So my conclusion of this is, if you ever get the chance, go see them. They will lift all other shows up a step, and wherever you go from here, it can only become better.

Now, I’m going to take a long, hot shower. I need to cleanse myself.