While your parents (and, perhaps, you) were spending Good Friday lamenting their sins and not eating meat, a crust-punk communion of sorts was brewing in someone’s basement. Fast Apple gathered four of Allston’s finest for an evening of local music and personal-space invasion. Despite some technical difficulties, the night’s sets were consistently high-energy thanks to a lively elbow-to-elbow audience that mostly consisted of beanied art-school kids nursing Miller High Lifes, people who work at Refuge Cafe, and someone’s parents. With lo-fi tracks about sloppy post-prom hook-ups and singers cloaked in druid robes, the evening morphed into its own, perverse holiday: Bad Friday, in which twenty-somethings gather to revel in their debauchery and worship Satan (i.e. listen to punk music).
Miami Doritos kicked things off with a short, tight set that solidified the night’s decidedly off-kilter atmosphere. Vocalist and guitarist Kurt played his riffs with cool ease and, despite the sweat of both himself and others, didn’t push his round glasses up the bridge of his nose even once. (Kurt also acted as the evening’s de-facto audio technician and could be seen running around adjusting speakers and tweaking dials all night). Drummer Alex played expertly, despite having donned a felt parrot costume in what one can only assume was an act of piety and condemnation of our base animal instincts.
Then someone flicked the lights off, and URSULA made things a little darker. The all-girl two-piece launched into an unforgiving half hour of wails, shrieks, and blunt retellings of adolescences past. They led the crowd in a raucous “motherfucker” mass chant, then launched into their latest Bandcamp release, “Cavegrrl.” The lead singer was unabashed, shrilly singing stories about getting cum on her Betsy Johnson prom dress and confessing “I want to die, I want to have sex ’til I die” while cozying up to crowd members. She forwent all traditional structure; she used her pick to scrape instead of pluck, her voice to shriek instead of sing, and wore a dog collar as a necklace. Hellhounds had never looked prettier.
Next up was ZEBU!, everyone’s favorite balding two-piece. Dynamic duo Steve and Ted kept things weird, thanks to abundant microphone deep-throating and morbid inter-song quips, like “This songs is about dying in Western Massachusetts” and “Isn’t it fun to watch two people die onstage?” For their final sweat-soaked song, drummer Ted abandoned his kit and launched himself into the crowd for a spooky singalong spattered with fierce, uncomfortable eye contact. He became a man possessed, pulling the hanging lightblub on and off rhythmically and shouting out lyrics sans-microphone once his cord eventually got pulled from its socket by some combat-booted culprit.
Once NICE GUYS took the stage (or the corner of the basement, rather), it suddenly became clear why someone on the Facebook event page had implored, “Anyone have a robe, preferably a Druids robe, that I could borrow?” Replacing lead singer Alex was, as would soon become painfully clear due to his abundant third-person self-referral, Krondor, from the Seventh Dimension of Pain and Punishment, cloaked hood-to-toe in dark brown robes. As soon as NICE GUYS started their first song, the crowd launched into their first fully-fledged mosh frenzy of the evening, shoving everyone into the piles of lumber stacked up against the side of the room, which quickly began to smell like sawdust and sweat.
Throughout NICE GUYS’s set, Krondor enlightened us with interesting tidbits about his demonic homeland–a punk-rock tourist’s guide to hell, so to speak. “The Seventh Dimension on Pain and Punishment is full of soft rock. Like O.A.R. and shit,” Krondor reveals matter-of-factly. “In the Seventh Dimension of Pain and Punishment, Krondor does not tune,” Krondor explains in the wake of a loosened guitar string. Alex’s newfound demonic identity was met with mixed reviews. “Fuck this, I didn’t come here for Krondor,” hissed a girl with a septum piercing.
About three-quarters of the way through their set, technical difficulties began to abound. The power kept going out in tempermental bursts, to the frustration of bandmates and drunken onlookers alike. Was it the cops? Divine invention? A wayward elbow knocking against the fusebox? Only god knows. NICE GUYS finished strongly, despite being unplugged and drenched in darkness. But isn’t that just how Krondor (and Satan) would have wanted it?