Well, this is already the third episode of this so far not quite terrifying wormhole ride, and I haven't yet shown you anything really weird or twisted so it's high time I opened up some darker doors.
This time, I would like to guide you back to a wednesday night, the 17th of March into the belly of one of the most professional party and concert places in Budapest, the A38 ship. One of the coolest, hardest and most insane groups performed an underground (or underwater?) black mass on that day there: Combichrist.
I can't remember how I got to know this most hellish of mainstream bands, but I do remember that a few weeks before I first heard about them, they were playing in Budapest. When I realised who they really are and that just a few weeks prevented me from being part of a thought-to-be-rare event, I was devastated. Since then, fate has compensated me well: last wednesday was the second time I saw them live, and I can assure you it's never ever enough of them.
Imagine a titanic factory filled with industrialised machine-monsters clanking, beating, whirring and shrieking in a predefined rhythm, moulding into a cacophony of rhythmic noise. They are huge, dangerous and frightening, but they can't hurt you if you know what to do. And that is exactly the key to success of Combichrist. They are harsh, aggressive and dark, but they are "safe" as far as the general public is concerned. Or at least that's what they think until they come to a concert.
Never have you seen anything so full of energy, so musically aggressive, yet so... "friendly". The band, under the leadership of the amazing and terrifying character of the singer Andy LaPlegua, explodes everytime on stage like a thousand nuclear warheads, never stopping for a second through the 90 minutes of a gig. Half-naked and tattooed, painted half black and drenched in sweat and water, shouting and smiling like an insane, picking apart the stage and throwing instruments at each other, these guys are zero percent normal. Their songs smash down upon the listener with a hundred tons of weight, crushing all resistance and making you dance like you never did before. Their lyrics and song titles are shocking, but within the boundaries of public taste, except for all the swearings in them. After 90 minutes of us dancing, jumping and shouting, the band decide to leave us. And there we stood, drenched in sweat and with an undeletable insane smile on our faces, wandering around like zombies, unable to recover from the shock of so gigantic an amount of energy. Everybody could use a Combichrist gig once a week.
This is my gallery of last year's Combichrist gig in Dürer-kert. And
this and
this and
this are three of their best songs.
