’68 are a skeletal locomotive of raw noise and energy – a force of overdriven immediacy that demands your attention. When they have it, you are spoilt by a veritable ear-feast of styles, influences and idiosyncrasies. They are ‘68 and I wanted the eye-feast (or, urm, gig). It went thusly:
The effect that playing on the same night as Gnarwolves and Maybeshewill has is immediately clear. There is enough space in the audience to swing a bag of elephant dicks. Painfully, there is also at least a metre in-between the first row of people and the small metallic barrier that separates the low stage from them – a no mans land, spawned of reluctance. No one wants to be as far away from the audience as they are close to the band. Only a maniac or a hero. Singer and guitarist Josh Scogin speaks to the crowd casually, not mentioning it’s lack of, well, crowd. So you just forget about it completely, or if it even matters at all.
They play through the songs in a rearranged order. On the album the track list spells: REGRETNOT. I don’t know what the new order spells, but the top result from an online anagram maker is: “GENRE TORT”, which is pretty apt. Tort, being defined as “a wrongful act or an infringement of a right”, a perfect way to describe their approach to music. They steal from, contort and assault genres; bending them to their will. They can quite easily be put into different categories: post-hardcore, noise rock, garage rock; or anything else lazily tidied away into the punk canon, for sake of order and marketability. The best I’ve heard on the matter though, is from Scogin himself, when asked why he chooses to write in this genre, he replies: “Let me answer your question with a question: What genre are we?”. Pompous indefinability aside, I’m glad nobody seems to know.
They cut quite the image onstage, they stand close facing each other, barely making full use of the stage. The drummer, Michael McClellan, sits at his drum kit; a great thundering bass drum, floor tom and snare. For cymbals, huge calamitous hats and a ride (rarely used as such). The sound it projects is huge and always loud. Scogin clings to a battered red S.G. and uses his effects board like a palette of intense snarling artillery, jigging from one pedal to the next – never a smothering mess of delay and insufferable superficiality, but a clever use of timbre, dynamics and drama.
ALSO: YOUR NEW FAVOURITE BAND: ’68
They play like the room is heaving and as if they need to prove themselves, which it isn’t and they don’t. The people who are there love them, but the cheers and support is weak, but still, as strong as it can be. Their energy and the quality of the performance doesn’t seem to come from an intent of making the most of a bad situation, or a consummate professionalism. The visceral and sweating rock and roll is for themselves. Their enjoyment and excitement for what they create, the improvisations pulled from the air and the feeling that anything can really happen, is so earnest and electrifying that the few of us there are very lucky to witness it.
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