show recap: Skegss

Listening to a band's music for the very first time in a live concert format is underrated. There's something special about having your first impression of a band's entire oeuvre being the way they present their various wares on the stage—a throwback to the days before recorded music, I guess, when you'd have to go to the town gazebo to hear the local jug band jam, or snag a coveted seat at a Mozart premiere centuries before the invention of classic radio stations.

This week I had the opportunity to check out the Australian band Skegss play their second of two sold-out nights at the Silver Lake venue El Cid. They were hitting L.A. before jetting off for another show at the esteemed desert concert spot Pappy & Harriet's. I'd never listened to them before and thought a night at a historic flamenco club / cabaret experiencing some good old-fashioned surf/garage rock was going to be good for me.

Stray thoughts and errant bloggings:

• I took the bus there because El Cid was off my blessed route...when I got off at my stop, I looked up to see a billboard for Suki Waterhouse's new album, the interestingly-titled Memoir of a Sparklemuffin ...the billboard's letters glittered in the growing dusk! Wow!! I might buy the record and send her management a note saying that the billboard closed the sale.
• The Skegss show was doors 7, show 8, no openers, and done by 9:15. Listen, if I do my lower back stretches, I can handle a four-hour four-band bill, but for a Chewsday, a single-band bill was a dream.
• The crowd for the band skewed pretty young, early twenties. A packed house of youngsters in rude health, dressed like they were ready to shred gnar or complete a kickflip at a moment's notice—the vibes were more San Diego than Los Angeles, which is fitting given Skegss's beachy Byron Bay origins. As I settled into my spot near the back, a young dude dashed across my periphery, wearing a striped Tommy Jeans Japan rugby shirt and screaming "CONNOR!"
• The band took the stage to Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," which was a great choice. God that song rips. When the first riff kicks in it makes me want to drink 8-10 domestic beers and then get in a fight.
• The music of Skegss: very enjoyable! Was trying to think of "comps," in real estate termage, for their thing. Here's what I came up with: What if the Ramones were entirely made up of Mac Demarcos? What if FIDLAR looked at the ocean and chilled out a little? What if the Strokes applied some surf wax to their tightly strung guitars? Riffs and bounce-a-long rhythms for days. People were really bopping.
• They had a cameraman onstage filming the action with a camcorder whose mounted light was police investigation-bright. The combination of high energy surf punk music and the video setup really brought out the crowdsurfers. A shit ton of people did it, either by hopping off the stage or getting hoisted by friends in the middle of the crowd. The sheer number of crowdsurfers had me pondering about memetic concert behavior—essentially, doing things at a show because you know it's the kind of show at which it will be allowed/encouraged. This kind of thing fascinates me because the behavior eventually starts to transcend the music itself; for example, people weren't really differentiating between rager songs and chiller songs to crowdsurf. The intensity didn't matter as much as the opportunity.
• There was someone in the pit for the entire duration of the show, simultaneously moshing and holding a vinyl record aloft. I've never seen anything like it. The commitment was total. Being in possession of a fragile piece of physical media was not going to stop this person from getting their mosh on.

• Near the end of the show, guitarist Ben Reed said "I would give a million dollars for a margarita." Skegss then played their 2018 song "Margarita," and after that, a fan hand-delivered Reed a margarita. (The crowd screamed for him to turn the marg into a shoey, which is the Aussie custom of drinking alcohol out of your own shoe. He did not do it, and that's more than okay.) I support any and all songs about margaritas including Mountain Brews epic ballad "The Worst Margarita Of My Life."
• Reed also broke a couple of guitar strings over the course of the show. The second time, the band waited out the string changeover by playing the two repeating notes of Nirvana's classic dirge "Something In The Way." A good chunk of the audience started singing, adding a little bit of football hooligan flair to the mmms so they sounded more like ohhhs. Is the wide knowledge of this song more thanks to Gen Z's general embrace of Cobain & Co., or with the trailer music for the 2022 Robert Battinson movie The Batman? Doesn't matter. It was weirdly my favorite moment of the night, the perfect way to pass the idle string-change moment, everyone on the exact same page.

Skegss are putting out a new album, Pacific Highway Music, on October 18.

Thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.