The stars align, the bookings flow, you’re on a train, a ferry, a train and a thunderstorm and then you’re in Paris on a Monday night, with friends made on barricades on two continents and a crowd converging in a dark red theatre, looking for something, something ungraspable, yet feeling so close, just there, just right there.
SLIFT
The effect is instant, I am barely aware the band is on stage that they’ve already started, they’re already a mile away, they’ve already blown my earplugs out. Describing music as cosmic needs specificity. This is what I imagine the creation of the planets to have sounded like. The crashing of tectonic plates. The bubbling gurgle of molten rock. The hiss of steam, the shiver of dirt. Creation as active continuous destruction.
This is Fantasia, SLIFT‘s latest and heaviest album, so heavy in fact it fools you into believing this is the core sound of the band, when in truth, they’ve long explored the frontiers of post-rock, psychedelic and more mellow stoner rock. They catch me right in that ideal brain space, where what I seek in music is loud, mean and distorted, more like friction of the synapses, more like static scratching and bursting all over your body.
Between the violent kicking around the stage hardcore-style and both our headbanging, I barely see Rémi Fosset on bass, but by God, do I hear him. The amp is right in front of me. I feel it in my bones, shaking my heart and earrings like a gust of wind. Jean Fosset on guitar takes us away, Canek Flores on drums ensures we return and the many textures of the trippy visuals and strobe lights make me wonder for a moment whether I’ll come back altered and rewired.
Though hailing from Toulouse, Paris embraces them like its own sons, from the packed-at-the-front band-T-shirt-clad fans to people singing along to the whole set and the nigh-immediate moshpit. There’s grooving to mixed time signatures on ‘A Storm of Wings’, there’s serious bouncing to fan-favourite ‘Ummon’ and there’s no coming down with our feet on the ground when the floor of L’Olympia seems especially designed to keep us airborne. An epic moment for SLIFT and an epic moment for us.
Waiting for Setlist.fm updated setlist
All Them Witches
At the risk of sounding like a random text received in the middle of the night followed immediately by “sorry lol wrong number”, the persistent voice I hear in my head as I carve out the words to write to you about All Them Witches is that of Jane Austen and that 211-year-old quote from Emma, “if I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more“. I’ve told strangers and friends and bewildered colleagues about them, I’ve gotten a US visa to see them live, I’ve broken budgets and personal identity over them, and now, when I have an official proper place to tell you all about it and why they matter and why you should see them live and why and why and why, all formulas, all my usual structure and methodology falls flat and feels cheap.
What do I say about them? Who are they to other people when they are so much to me? How can I list song names like they’re groceries or tell you where they fit in this one setlist when whole moments of life hinged and bent with them (the first time I ever heard ‘El Centro’ in Austin, that night in Madrid when I couldn’t feel my body anymore during ‘Blood and Sand’, how I’ll never feel as endless as I did two nights in Nashville)? How can I critique or even describe this one moment in time when the memories flash and overlap with the red lights purple lights overhead and orange lights blue lights from a million years ago?
Let me attempt.
The Nashville-brewed quartet take to the L’Olympia stage as rockstars by any mainstream consideration. Their latest album House of Mirrors is out and selling fast for all to enjoy, dissect and make their own (you can read my review of it HERE), they’ve signed to BMG, hit over 100k followers on Instagram and have filled festival tents and venues as yet unprecedented for them in Europe, if the sheer scale of their Rock Werchter audience can stand as testament of that.
And yet the band I heard at Brudenell Social Club in Leeds four years ago is unmistakably still here.
Hard to miss it when they start with ‘Blood and Sand / Milk and Endless Water’, their 2015 bonafide masterpiece of tension-building, a seven-minute taster platter of everything that makes them one of the best bands writing now. The opening arpeggio resonates through the room, the cheers rise and we’re gone, headed out on this psychedelic journeying of abstract lyricism and earthy imagery of things unbearable and yet desirable. The riff continues unperturbed, but the bass grows more distorted and Parks on vocals rages louder and rougher. It’s a wave building into a colossal crash and we ride it straight into ‘Don’t Bring Me Coffee’, a much welcome return of the old headbanger, and the new ‘Saturn Song’, cooling us down into a ponder of all that makes a life worth living.
It is a band like the letter Aleph of Borges: the more you look, the more you realise it contains everything – heartbreak, fury, soul-searing melodies and shredding solos from the one and only Ben McLeod, the sort of ambiguous visual poetry that could keep you ruminating on its meaning for the rest of your life, textures of sound to match the myriad textures of real life. A verse like “lose the body lose the journey” glides over the gentle playfulness of the piano, “everyday in the pocket of blood” jolts hard and heavy into its metal riff, “tell myself to love everybody” rushes over the drums and punches straight into your gut.
They started the tour playing House of Mirrors almost in its entirety, an hour-long commitment to bringing the songs to life live. By this point of the tour, the surprise is in seeing how they mix them up with the usual setlist staples. The forever electric raging ‘1×1’, to which the whole crowd yells “I can’t wait to be defeated”, feeds into the hectic ‘Hold Up Say What’, its heartfelt bridge and erratic final verse fueling the moshpit. ‘Aethernet’, with its cowboy swagger, lands right by ‘Workhorse’, the themes switching timelines to more reflective blues (and don’t I dream of one day crowdsurfing to it).
Some things change, some things don’t. Nowadays they have a complete touring team with them, handling everything from the gorgeous lights (Aaron Johnson) to the impeccable sound (Chris Hurshman) to their unique startling photography (Dylan Handley). They have an elevated platform for Allan and Christian at the back. But as big as the stage and crowd and tour are, the sound retains its intimacy, its immediacy. You can hear every slick drumstick beat on ‘Workhorse’, the full tone and scope of Ben’s Les Paul, and the lyrics and Parks’ voice feel as honest and true as the first day he ever sung them.
Then there it is. The jamming on ‘Angels on the Wayside’ seamlessly melts into the bridge and phones come up to film. I turn around to watch the packed-to-the-gills L’Olympia, this beautiful beautiful theatre in the heart of Paris, under the strands of lights projected over us. Faces beam, arms lift, palms turn forward like in church. It’s a new song, yet everybody sings along. Bands play their whole lives waiting for a moment like this.
They commit to their darkest songs at the end: ‘Culling Line’ with its earworm bassline, ‘Red Rocking Chair’ with Allan on violin singing our sorrows back to us, ‘See You Next Fall’ always coming like a promise for the future “see you next fall / Sick of it all”. Naturally, they close on ‘When God Comes Back’, the entry song for most of the crowd and by all means a hit song, what with its heavy blues and soaring anthemic chorus.
Having seen the moshpit at work, they switch up the setlist and return for an encore with the original dancing song, ‘Alabaster’, instead of the groovy doom piece ‘The Death of the Coyote Woman’. I’ve dubbed it “the neck breaking song” a long time ago, with the triple crashes of the chorus challenging even the most dedicated headbanger. However, for the first time ever, I’m in the pit for this. I hear something in my back crack into place under someone’s arm or elbow or full body. The chorus crashes and so do we all, against each other, legs dangled and balance lost and eyes wide open in elation of being in this chaos by your own volition, of trusting strangers to get you out alive. Dazed and dazzled and all too fast, it’s over.
There’s a great fear in me that the next show I see them at will be my last. That I’ll calm down after and never need to follow a tour again, just catch their London date and call it a day. And every time that fear shows up, I remember the thought I had in Denver once, that past a certain point it ceases to be about you. It’s a given. Past a certain point, it becomes enmeshed with folk you love, places you’ve never seen before, people you can become and things you’ve never said coming out easy. When it comes to your band, it simply becomes your life. As natural as going home. The choice to follow like the deep breath you take before you dive for something wonderful.
Cover Photography by @_anatheme
Waiting for Setlist.fm updated setlist