Sunday 24 November 2013

No (skin)flowers for us tonight. The Young Gods @ B90 Gdansk



I've waited for 20 years to hear Skinflowers live and still haven't.
What I heard tonight didn't leave me completely satisfied, but it was a great show nonetheless.

I didn't have any particular expectations about tonight. The band, whose creative output is so hard to define, have been involved in such a variety of diverse and incogruous projects that I didn't really know what I was going to get. I didn't quite hope for an unplugged show, but thought I'd receive a good industrial thrashing.  The opening of the gig made  me worry how I was going to survive a vocal (almost inaudible at first) and electronic device show only. To my satisfaction after the first song was over, the lights revealed a drummer and since then it was only getting better and better. I was smitten by an avalanche of mad electronic sounds and industrial noises, broken beats and erratic rhythm, booming vocals combined with weird ballerina dances performed by the Franz Treichler. The music gained momentum only to slow down all of a suddeen never to reach a climax.

The gig was one of the shortest ever. The band left the stage after one hour, but there were two encores to mitigate the feeling of being unsatisfied.
The Young Gods arrived in their most ancient line-up and played almost all of the songs from their first two albums, which explains why they didn't choose to play the hit everyone was craving for.
 What surprised me was that twenty years after the icons of the long dead and burried industrial music still sounded fresh and powerful. Although no none plays fifty 2-minute-long songs any more, they didn't sound dated at all. This may be due to the revival of the sounds of the 80s and 90s or it may be that the music has defied the passage of time. Or maybe simply I felt good there listening to the sounds I once loved and cherished.


The attitude of the audience of about 300, who consisted mainly of old fans, grew warmer and warmer and the gig ended with people hurling themselves spasmatically to the music.


On that night I also felt the nearing winter. After the most gentle November in my life December bared its teeth freezing my fingers onto my fag. 

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