Better Vibes With Better Lovers
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #177. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
———
Ruminations on the power of the riff.
———
Heavy music is at its best when there is minimal separation between the artist and the audience. Few entertainment experiences can match the sheer power of standing feet away from a wall of amps, the force of a thunderous double-kick drum hitting you in the chest, limbs of crowd surfers passing overhead. The level of kinetic energy generated by a crowd in a small venue is inversely proportional to the band’s intensity and the room’s square footage; when this mixture achieves an ideal equilibrium, any space can be turned into a combustible mass of volume, sweat and life-affirming catharsis.
One of the few advantages of living in Fargo, ND – a vibrant college town far away from a major city – is that our unique confluence of geography and demographics creates the ideal conditions to see big bands play at small venues. Our modest population size and remote location mean we’re not a regular destination for most touring acts, and when your favorite bands come through town, there’s no guarantees if or when they’ll be back. We’re also an unknown quantity for bands who have never been here before; no one outside of the area knows anything about our town, except for being the namesake of a certain Coen brothers movie that, for the most part, doesn’t even take place here.
When you live here, you get used to driving long distances to go to shows out of town. Yet every so often, when the conditions are right, we’ll get a show that feels like it wouldn’t have been the same anywhere else. These are shows where, packed shoulder to shoulder, you know that you’re witnessing something made more special by the fact that you can’t take it for granted. Shows where even the band themselves seem taken aback by the response they receive from a crowd that can’t afford to be jaded. Many of my favorite shows that I’ve been to over the years fit somewhere in this description.
Seeing Better Lovers this past month brought these dynamics together in rare fashion. Formed from the ashes of Every Time I Die’s semi-recent implosion, with ex-members Jordan Buckley (guitar), Stephen Micciche (bass), and Clayton Holyoak (drums) joining forces with former Dillinger Escape Plan vocalist Greg Puciato and current Fit for an Autopsy guitarist/heavy record producer du jour Will Putney, they’re a heavy music Voltron of sorts, an unlikely collision of aggressive musicians who could have called it quits long ago but are collectively at the top of their game. This is iron sharpening iron in a group that fits perfectly together, though no one would have predicted their formation.
When I saw that Better Lovers were not only touring, but coming through my town, I almost did a double take. They were booked at The Aquarium, a 260-capacity room that felt almost assured to sell out, qualifying as the smallest venue on their three-week routing. For context, when Every Time I Die played this town several years ago, it was in a venue approximately three times the size. We were also sandwiched between dates in Winnipeg and Minneapolis where they played 600-plus capacity rooms. Not only would we be fortunate enough to see Better Lovers without making a four-hour drive to one of those cities, but we’d get to see them in a space barely big enough to contain their monstrous presence. In other words, the best way to see them anywhere.
On paper, this show had the makings of being something special. Then, a week before the show, I heard a rumor that we were the only city on the entire tour that wasn’t selling well in advance. Instead of expecting wall-to-wall pandemonium, I started to anticipate standing at the bar in a mostly empty room, watching a band that represented the last gasps of my dying youth dissipating before my eyes. When given the opportunity to prove itself, this town usually delivers, but maybe this just wouldn’t be the night for us.
Fortunately, when I rolled up to the venue after the first opening act concluded their set (I was later told I missed out on a strong performance from Greyhaven), the room was already packed. After another pair of solid sets from Foreign Hands and SeeYouSpaceCowboy, Better Lovers started setting up while a montage of love-related songs ranging from American Nightmare’s “Love American” to Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talking About Love.” It lent a professional wrestling-esque vibe to the proceedings, a tongue-in-cheek hype track of sorts before unleashing total sonic devastation.
Once they had generated enough tension, Puciato stepped onto the stage, grabbed the mic and said, with a subtle but discernible touch of disbelief in his voice, “Alright Fargo . . . let’s make this the best show of the tour.” On any other night, this would have felt like a throwaway statement, the kind of thing bands say before every show. This time, though, it felt like he was sincerely throwing down the gauntlet. People had shown up, seemingly despite the odds and against all expectations, in this out-of-the-way cow town that he had probably never been to before. What would we do with this moment?
For the next hour, Puciato was a conductor of controlled chaos, jumping into the crowd and throwing himself into the set like a man on fire. The entire band was locked in and firing on all cylinders, channeling decades of experience into an airtight demonstration of technical metalcore excellence, engineered for maximal aural destruction. While the trend in heavy music has leaned toward guitarists using smaller amps, they showed up with large speaker cabs, and you could feel their full force hitting you in the chest.
The audience responded in kind with stage dives and circle pits. Standing just off to the side, awash in noise and avoiding taking a foot to the face, I was reminded of how it first felt to go to these types of shows when I was younger. The last time I had seen Puciato perform was when I was a senior in high school, watching The Dillinger Escape Plan (notorious for their chaotic live performances) in a venue of similar capacity but on the other side of the world in England (where my military-bound family was stationed). At this point in my life, seeing aggressive music in a live setting has mostly lost its sense of wonder, but somehow, seeing an unexpected band in an unexpected setting deliver an auditory ass kicking rekindled something I thought I’d lost long ago, an uncomplicated joy that comes from being in community with those around you, gathered for what could best be described as a group therapy session set to the tune of a concrete mixer.
After the final discordant notes rang out and the lights came back on, there was a distinct sense that we had witnessed something that will never happen in the same way again. Better Lovers may or may not ever play this city again, and if they do, it almost certainly won’t be a venue of such intimate size. Sometimes living in an out of the way place means missing shows and tours that skip our town, but occasionally, it can also mean experiencing this music in a way that might not be possible anywhere else.
———
Ben Sailer is a writer based out of Fargo, ND, where he survives the cold with his wife and dog. His writing also regularly appears in New Noise Magazine.
