Gusher

1. Ceremony with Gusher – Launchpad (Albuquerque, NM) – Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Hmm, there’s a strange, primal link between the music of Ceremony and the behavior it elicits from a live audience. That would be an entirely boring observation, illuminating only my own greenness at punk shows, if the name of the band in question wasn’t also the name of that link. Launchpad’s unselfconscious audience (of about 40) could have invented their own dance ritual, so easily did they enact and yet so little did they seem to consciously follow the code of skank (as laid down in 1982 in the documentary Another State of Mind). Ceremony’s trademark blasts of intricate noise were sometimes what inspired the violence, but other times they didn’t, and instead some undercurrent in the music (a skeletal, arrhythmic guitar intro, etc.), detectable only to the chosen few, would set it going again. Singer Ross Farrar, whether straining forward on the stage, sitting placid on its edge, or falling on and crawling across the floor below (during the squealing guitar coda of “Repeating the Circle”; I hadn’t previously thought to imagine the singer’s actions as being relevant during that thrilling void), was chief instigator, weirdly oblivious to but taking silent responsibility for the atomic collisions.

Originally announced opening act Royal Headache (more about them in a bit) didn’t end up following Ceremony on this leg of their tour, but they could have placed the band in a classic punk context (which maybe Ceremony don’t want, or warrant). I’m not certain what context actual openers Gusher provided, if any, but between the thudding, sludgy momentum of the songs’ violent peaks, they had some nice instrumental passages, one being particularly shoegaze-y and matched by vocals that, in this context, recalled The Chameleons’ Mark Burgess (in muffled fervor mode: singer/drummer Zacque Dana cannily wore a mic’d gas mask, of sorts). - The Big Takeover