Death Grips are not a band; Death Grips are a punk band. Death Grips are the future; Death Grips are the past. On this hot steamy January night a packed Ding Dong witnessed a 57 minute relentless barrage of dystopian electro punk. (Now, you may think ‘relentless barrage’ is just this correspondent demonstrating meaningless verbosity, however there were in fact no breaks between songs at all.)
The stage set-up was very simple and somewhat ominous with two huge plasma screen televisions rotated longways and sitting longways atop long table, the only other equipment of stage were a drum kit off to the lower right. There was no support, just a DJ playing old school punk tunes like Dead Kennedys and Bad Brains, so when Death Grips’ drummer Zach Hill started pounding the skins at 10pm on the dot the entire room surged forward like the expanding body of Tetsuo Shima in Akira when he reaches his most powerful. As Zach Hill, the renowned punk drummer for Hella and Boredoms, was beginning to beat the act’s vocalist/rapper Stefan Burnett was linking the plasma screens to two laptops. Once the visuals were up and running, it began.
The set primarily comprised of tracks from last year’s No Love No Web but Death Grips’ delved back to their infamous ‘mixtape’ called Exmilitary, that for many was the act’s debut album. The song from this release that got the biggest mosh and crowd surf was Guillotine with the entire audience fist pumping and chanting the chorus of “It goes, it goes, it goes, guillotine”. At some points during the set, as compressed dubstep-inspired bass lines wrestled with machine gun drums and lyrics straight from hell, I imagined the shirtless, muscle-ripped and tattoo-covered Stefan Burnett as this generations street walking panther.
At 10:57pm everything stopped.
BY DAN WATT
LOVED: Palpable punk music.
HATED: Nothing – even the excessive heat made sense.
DRANK: Like fuck I was losing my spot to go to the bar.
