Look, I’m 47. I go see Phish, I go see jazz, I go see prog. Occasionally I’ll go see a metal show and fool myself into thinking I’m seeing something scary or dangerous. But metal’s faux-scary these days, so wrapped in its comic book trappings that it engenders a feeling of the comfortable no matter how often the word death gets tossed in.

But last night, man, last night was some scary f***ing music. When I closed my eyes and blocked out the familiar (dancing hippies, Kuroda’s strangely fitting Art Deco lights) I was 18 again, pressed up against the back of the Gothic Theater, loaded and frightened out of my mind as Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy bathed himself and the front of the crowd in fake blood to the sounds of collapsing civilization.

So industrial is what I keep returning to in trying to describe last night to myself, just to make some sense of it. I was not expecting *that*.

If I were to describe the music in the way I might describe a Phish concert, I’d say it was like hearing Tool play Split Open and Melt for an hour. Or like an alternate universe where Trey and Les had met as teenagers and Phimus were a decades old vampire ayahuasca band. Or like having three amazing concerts playing in separate YouTube tabs all at once.

But all that misses the mark on the deeper, stranger emotional impact of Trey’s endless echoes mixed with Claypool’s bad acid trip crackle/thump and whatever the hell mad man of the mountain Copeland is doing back there. Seriously, dude is like a Bond villain or something. I bet he has an underwater base.

Anyway, I’ve got tickets to tonight as well, but there’s a taste of fear in my mouth.

I love it.