Rock Monsters Romania

 “A critic is someone who knows the way but can’t drive the car.”

Or so I’ve heard. And guess who doesn’t have a driving license. But I love to write. Putting words together is my favourite thing in the world. I’m sort of on a learning curve with this project, and once you’re inside the rollercoaster, the only way out is forward. With that being said, I think I’m gonna do just fine with telling you how I feel about things. 

I listened to Armand Popa’s latest album “Fuzz Panic” on my commute, on the day it dropped, but only after I’d been done with my Harry Styles psychosis. It was quite a joyride, driven by someone who’d left their “Joy of Missing Out” era way behind. This reminded me of how it felt to reach my mid twenties. People always talk about this passage as if you only get smarter and that’s it. More careful, more put together. But I was a mess. I had my baggage from the past and my dreams for the future, but I had no idea where I was at the given moment. However, there is one thing they were right about. I felt cooler. I felt edgier, and less interested in being sad. Not an entirely different person, and not nearly at my best, ‘cause I like to think that what’s best is what’s to come. That’s what these tracks were like, to me. A statement, a scream into the void. I’m not entirely sure what he’s screaming, I’m not sure if it’s either truth or lie, but I’m hearing.

So naturally I went to the album launch concert in Control Club, on March 10th. Most of the night was a worthy trip. Both meanings of the word “trip.” I’d had a few rough days, I’d been feeling what one of my high school teachers would call “spring asthenia,” when, at the beginning of March, the class attendance would suddenly drop. It was the weather, of course. They needed to decompress. And I needed to decompress and maybe float a little, and float I didn’t, since the drums from “Intro” threw a dozen hammers into my head, and left me with a few seconds of peace before they commenced with the rest of the album. 

I have to say, for a bit, the crowd was either disproportionately dead or chatting too loud. Now I’ve been to a bunch of regrettable gigs, and I know rock doesn’t have the etiquette of opera, but I got confused. I didn’t know how to feel for a few minutes there. 

I’m no pharmacy specialist, but everyone knows that psychedelics kick in through some very mystical ways. And this is how this concert felt like. From the crowd, this show felt like being taken into a sweet kind of madness. Sure, there was an obvious intent to simulate a Woodstock stage performance, and the musical elements were there to help. It took a few minutes to let the chemicals slide from my ears to my brain and to actually start feeling like I was part of a time I didn’t get to experience firsthand. And it helped that the band seemed to really enjoy being on stage. I sensed that Armand intended on putting on a show, playing the role of the wild animal he describes in the respective song, but you could see him break character between some parts, when he would step back and smile from ear to ear.

Now here is how, or why I said before that I feel like this whole thing is a statement. Statements can be true or false. They can be revealing or deceiving. And something in the performance made me question the true nature behind this bold new aesthetic. It’s true it was my first time hearing him live, but if you just recently shapeshifted from an indie sad boy to a wild “idgaf” puma, I wonder why I can still hear, in some tracks, remnants of the same soft, rather shy vocals from the older projects? Maybe it’s because we’re still human and stuff. We’ll always carry ourselves with us, for the rest of our lives, no matter who we wish we were instead. 

I have to say I also loved the instrumentals and pretty much everything from the compositions that met my average listener’s ear. Everything was very well crafted, even if I would have liked some tracks to be a bit more different from one another. At some point into the show I felt like I was listening to the same jam over again, and I would have wanted to be hooked on something else in between. That’s the sin of the chosen niche, I believe. Thanks to how the drums were written into the album though, my sober brain didn’t get bored. And right when I needed a break, the passage from “Rough” came to the rescue. The Black Sabbath cover fitted well in this cinematic universe too. It was convincing enough and added a nice spark to eclipse my shock at the fact he didn’t play any of his earlier work afterwards, and the show ended before I got to even process it.

Well, all good things end. And a good trip eventually requires one to satisfy their munchies, and so did I and my friends after this concert was done. It didn’t matter that we had to be at work the next morning, and two of us are doctors, so that says something. We grabbed some shawarma, debriefed, laughed a bit and were thankful for good music, good food and good people. I wish the best for Armand Popa and his promising musical career, and I also wish the best for my neck pain, while I’m writing this paragraph on my phone, locked into the classic shrimp position. Too much “Brain Rot,” I guess.

“Crowd Diaries” is a series of heartfelt articles with the purpose of reviewing live music from a personal experience.

Text by Raluca Baciu