Rio Hondo College Newspaper

El Paisano

Rio Hondo College Newspaper

El Paisano

Rio Hondo College Newspaper

El Paisano

Iceage impresses L.A. crowd on night one

Punk is not dead. It’s alive and well as the Danish punk/noise-rock band Iceage brought their energy with them to Los Angeles for a two-night stand at The Echo in Echo Park.

A fairly large crowd was on hand on Nov.1 for night one of Iceage’s back to back scheduled shows.

Hardly any under age kids were present as a majority of the crowd consisted of adults in their early to mid-twenties, buying drinks all night at the bar, and chatting out in the patio while smoking cigarette after cigarette.

The show began at around 5:30 p.m. with three opening acts performing before Iceage.

Story continues below advertisement

Among the opening acts, Rakta (an all-female “neo-psychdelia”, experimental band from Brazil) were the best, as they played hard hitting “lo-fi” psychedelic noise-rock that made audiences fall in love with the band and quite possibly the beautiful Brazilian woman in the band.

After a weird instrumental noise DJ set by producer Helm, Iceage finally took the stage in a graceful matter; never once speaking directly towards the crowd.

It’s true. The only words that came out of front man Elias Bender Rønnenfelt besides the lyrics themselves were the song titles before each song.

The band never once addressed the crowd. They simply took the stage and left the stage, all while fans cheered and praised the Danish quartet for an outstanding, relatively short set.

In total, Iceage performed only nine songs, with almost all the songs being off the new record “Plowing Into the Field of Love”.

Iceage opened up with the slow yet aggressively melody track of “On My Fingers”.

Heads were moving left and right, up and down, before a moshpit unfolded during “How Many”.

Rønnenfelt’s vocals were superb; sounding the same, if not better than the album recordings.

The on stage energy Rønnenfelt brings instantly electrifies the crowd as they moshed and crowd surfed numerous of times during tracks such as “The Lord’s Favorite” and “Forever”.

Rønnenfelt went into the crowd countless of times as he sang his lungs out and danced across stage, almost slipping at times.

Iceage instantly walked off stage as soon as they finished their performance as the lights remained off, giving fans a sense of a possible encore to come.
The crowd waited and waited, yet Iceage was nowhere to be seen as they quickly escaped backstage.

Although most bands would probably be called despicable or viewed as disgraceful for these type of actions, fans of Iceage simply did not give a f**k and left the early show satisfied and impressed by the Danish punks.

But hey, that’s punk.

 

Iceage performing live at Pitchfork Music Festival Paris 2013 via YouTube

Leave a Comment

Comments (0)

All comments are subject to review.
All El Paisano Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest