Death Grips in Whelan's on 29_04_2013 by Yan Bourke_08-banner
Words by Marcus O’Sullivan

Death Grips are a known quantity by now, so when you sign up for a show there are certain things you expect. Intensity, aggression, exhaustion– Death Grips are seen and heard, yes, but mostly experienced, or even survived. And everyone in a sold-out Whelan’s is certainly on edge, like animals with an eery prescience of some impending natural disaster.

But all the home listening in the world didn’t prepare us for the sheer, brutal physicality of their live experience. hearing this material performed live adds a whole other dimension – suddenly the violent aggression is three-dimensional, it’s present, it’s real. It’s like the difference between watching a game on tv and then seeing it live – you suddenly realize what you were seeing was merely a facsimile, an adulterated approximation of something completely different.

That’s mainly down to surely one of the best frontmen of the last decade, MC Ride. Imagine a psychotic hobo who broke into a military complex and stole the Captain America serum, and is now bent on destroying white privilege. That pretty much sums it up. The sheer physical threat and menace he exudes on stage is incredible. It’s the danger you feel off a man who has clearly rejected middle-class societal values. Standing towards the back, writing notes, I feel the fear that he knows full well the fatted contentment of our lives. He knows, and he could tear it to pieces with his bare hands. This is our Freddie Mercury, people! That insane, dynamic, incredible breed of front-man, so desperately rare.

And if you weren’t there in the mass of surging bodies at the front, experiencing a full-on kinetic energy transfer with everyone around you while he rained down on you for an hour, you weren’t really getting the full experience. Kind of like the difference between watching a stampede up close and being in one. Death Grips are participatory. You don’t observe, you engage.

In this modern era of digital narcissism, where the most reaction you might get at a gig from someone might be gentle swaying as they hold their smartphone aloft, it just feels important we have bands who still provoke this kind of physical reaction. Something that you couldn’t document it if you were fully participating in it. Their purity, the bloody single-mindedness of them is like like a blessed scythe through our society’s bullshit. somehow they’ve merged the spirit of Punk, the honesty of Hip Hop, and the aggression of Metal into something genuinely new and exciting.

Don’t let the hype colour your opinion- Death Grips could not be more real.

Death Grips Photo Gallery

Photos: Yan Bourke