Rock Monsters Romania

by Raluca Baciu

I was gonna open with “So I was in Control Club…”, but this is starting to sound like a sketch. It’s like saying “A skeleton walks into a bar”.… Where else? But you get it. I was in Control, on the terrace, after this very event in the title, pondering about what exactly my purpose is for writing these kinds of things. I wish not to speak from a high horse, for mine is not very elevated, but rather from a unicorn, so you can take it with a few grains of salt, unsure of what is real or pure invention. Or, as my friend and fellow Rock Monsters colleague Ionela Plesan suggested, I shall speak from the crowd. So this is it, y’all. Take it as a diary entry from the pit: mundane, intimate, and definitely opinionated. Enjoy.

Spring was due on the 26th of February. It was a month that came and went unannounced. My brain was still thawing along with the muddy snow on the sidewalk. My mood was a reflection of that week’s weather: uncertain and kind of gloomy. 

That evening, the Stray Lights community had another wonderful showcase planned. The main acts were both coming all the way from Oradea: Baby Elvis, launching their newest album, “World Fame,” and Mock Surprise, who came with a new single titled “Thumb.”  I almost didn’t feel like going anywhere but I did. I was in a rotting state, unsure of how willing I was to listen to two bands for the first time. Look at me, not wanting to do the very thing I signed up for. Motivation isn’t real, sometimes you just gotta do the thing. You’ll like it later. And so did I. Off we go. Ionela accompanied me for this one. Or, I should say I accompanied her, since she knew the bands and couldn’t contain her hype for the event. I was in for a surprise… get it?

Mock Surprise opened the night with a set that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the last show I went to where I danced like that. You know, sometimes you go to such gigs and kind of dance a bit out of social obligations. That wasn’t the case here. Their set was strikingly diverse, but it wasn’t too much. Their discography diverges from the idea of fitting conventionally into a specific genre. It’s true that being eclectic is a quirk now, and a train worth jumping in on regardless of the current quality of its tracks. However, the crowds will always find their way to call you one thing or another. You’re either indie or garage, punk or psychedelic, and every other foreign spark around your beats is merely an add-on. Mock Surprise takes this approach differently, to a point where you don’t know what to call them. I usually fear for such artists, thinking that they might end up in the “Jack of all trades, master of none” pile. They’ve been picking up subgenres and crossing them over until they blended into something that can be claimed as a signature sound. There is a loophole though. In this dopamine gold rush, where everything becomes something else every other minute, where attention is a steady currency, there’s one thing you need to do to stand out: Be fun. Have fun. And boy did we have fun. I couldn’t catch a break.

If I were to pick up on something from the Mock Surprise set, the thing that pulled me a bit out from the fantasy was the fact that the lead vocals were a bit too consistent throughout the set. Since the itinerary took us from slow to fast paced and from ballads to noisy tunes, I expected the vocalist to tell me the same story. I felt his performance to be stuck in the technical delivery rather than the experience, and the result was that his tone and attitude were pretty much the same from the beginning until the end. However, they were my favourites for the night and they did end up in my playlist. That weekend I had one hell of a home cleaning session with “Portmanteau” serving as my soundtrack.

Baby Elvis were something that took me a whole lot to understand. These guys are loud as hell. They’re demanding to be heard. Their most recent album “World Fame” is a kaleidoscope. It’s got piercing colours, old school garage riffs, saturation and druuuuuumssss. Listening to it feels like whatever they were doing in the sixties. I don’t think the “Elvis” part comes from the historical context though. But maybe I’m biased here. I believe the real Elvis didn’t invent anything. He just made it popular and appropriated some sounds here and there. In my humble perception, I wouldn’t associate it with this band. I believe it’s more of a symbol, or a statement of some kind. Maybe it just sounded cool to them. 

About the crowd experience, I believe I noticed something with this band. I felt like I was in the presence of some top tier musicians, each so good and so sure of themselves that I couldn’t focus on one because of the other. Sometimes the choruses and the instrumental breakdowns would feel jammed, as if the instruments were competing with one another rather than working together to deliver a common message. I know it’s a particularity of the niche, and circling back to what I said about fun? Fun there was. But I felt a bit splattered at the end. Like I had to pick myself up. That sure wasn’t a tragedy whatsoever. But it makes you think. Which is what art is supposed to do, so I think it was a successful set in the end.

I felt like the crowd was a bunch of amped up bugs running around the place. The people enjoyed every song and that was obvious in the movements. By the end of the night I had found myself in different corners of that room, either capturing a few glimpses of the show with my phone or just moving around without realizing I was traveling along with the music. 

It was such a musically eventful night that the overall beauty of the show totally eclipsed the fact that they had a pretty lengthy guitar malfunction during their set. It was awkward at first, but they handled it eventually, and it felt like a cheeky interlude that I almost forgot to add here. I wish to use this funny bit to emphasize the fact that people don’t remember your mistakes as much as they think of their own. So there’s no reason to panic. And neither did they.

I left with a few tunes added to my memory, a CD from the merch stand and a bunch of thoughts that took me too long to verbalize. But the warmth of March was just around the corner, and I would eventually awaken once again. I’m curious as to what these bands have to offer in the future, in case they wish to come back any time soon.