My shoes stick to the floor. Spilt beer. Amidst it all, flashes of light and the acrid smell of sweat and sweet euphoria. I wasn’t looking for anything, but I found plenty.
Pales from Strasbourg are setting the place alight. It’s insidious, yet shamelessly flaunted. What didn’t quite win me over on record is now sweeping me along like a voracious whirlpool. Here, spoken word kisses nu metal with a wet tongue, baring its gnawed-down punk teeth in a ritualistic din.
Then the air glows, vibrating in the heat. It’s as if the Devil himself had driven into this space beneath the stone arch of a railway viaduct. Maquina. from Portugal have a set list, but it’s irrelevant in this moment of escalation. The songs blend into a frenzy of pressure and pleasure. Technoid headbanging, demonic stomping, spirited vanishing.
Reality shifts violently. Wiped away by the explosion of lightning striking 10,000 litres of petrol. There stand gods on stage, ennobling us with crowns of sweat beads.
As a thick curtain of artificial mist, beer vapour, and body odour unfurls before me, I watch the frenzied crowd of young people in front of the stage. My heart leaps, and at the same time I feel old and tired as I watch them jumping around ecstatically. I think back to those escapist moments I’ve experienced myself with such intensity.
And a comforting warmth washes over me—and it’s not Maquina’s sizzling performance, but a certainty: rock music is neither dead nor undead. It’s defiantly alive. Purists are probably horrified that the genre—born of folk and blues—seems to be emerging from the rhythms of electronic compositions in the 21st century, yet loses none of its escapist quality. What’s happening here is worlds better than forced, nostalgic trifles like Greta Van Fleet.
And so, to the hypnotic pounding and distorted vocals, all that energy—all that pent-up frustration—is transmitted and released through the pulsating body. Presumably, my thoughts are a philosophical overinterpretation. Perhaps it is enough simply to experience a visceral catharsis in an age drained pale and bloodless by the digital.
