There are some concerts that get us all excited, concerts we’ve been eagerly awaiting. There will be a time when the world will acknowledge that with The Change is Me, Doodseskader released the best album of the year (so far)! But that’s not all... With Lila Ehjä opening the show and her blend of cold wave and industrial music in shades of black, the evening promised to be just the way we like it: varied, authentic, intimate, and free from the boring rules of so-called “genre” or that sort of thing that people from the old world needed to organize their CDs into boxes. Try putting Doodseskader in a box—you’ll see, these two Belgians will smash all your furniture and you’ll have to move out.
LILA EHJÄ
In May, whatever may, things will be dark. The weather’s grey and rainy, the parisian subway is half empty, half not working… All the dark stars align for Lila Ehjä’s urban melancholy. It’s dark, she’s dressed in black, images are projected behind her: textures, a face, but mostly black. Finally, at one point, she does ask for a bit of red after all!
With Lila Ehjä, we still greatly appreciate her highly personal take on dark ‘wave’ music. You can sense that her influences are wide-ranging and that, far from sticking to a single style, she enjoys borrowing the nocturnal chill of cold wave’s pale neon lights, adding a touch of EBM intensity here, some noise and industrial deviations there, and above all layers of guitar that lean heavily towards obscure metal. The result is cold, opaque, dense as a thick winter fog, yet also ghostly: every sound reaches us through a haze of reverb. We listen to the music as if conversing with spectres, which is always rather cool.
We find ourselves swept along by this sepulchral poetry; the only lights are those reflected in the puddles—the sort of lights you’d be wise to avoid following if you don’t want to end up face-first in the gutter. On stage, Lila Ehjä is alone. Well, not really alone: she has the darkness with her, which is perhaps the best of company, but also her guitar and a few theatrical poses. Her performance is embodied; there’s something visceral about it that avoids the jaded, detached feel one sometimes finds in all that ‘dark music ending in “wave”’, but also a kind of dissonance, a vague awareness of playing with the codes of darkness, adding just the right amount to make it cool without it ever feeling artificial.
DOODSESKADER
‘Artificial’—like so many other words—simply doesn’t fit Doodseskader. Tim de Gieter and Sigfried Burroughs take to the stage. The atmosphere is electric and the opening moments are intense: there’s definitely nothing these two can’t pull off as they kick things off with Glass Mask On. The screen reads 45; Tim’s T-shirt says 93, a nod to the parisian suburbs. The music blends hip-hop, industrial, 90s alternative rock, grunge, hardcore, sludge... The gig has only been going for a minute, yet it’s already been vicious, aggressive, melancholic, poetic, raw.
And then everything stops. “Fuck the jack,” shouts a bloke in the crowd: a technical glitch, a jack plug has come loose. The gig is interrupted for a good ten minutes just as it had started; our hearts are breaking. Doodseskader deserve so much better and had already given us, in a single track, so much, so much of themselves. These two seem to be carrying a curse, a shadow that weighs them down. “Fuck the jack, I’m going to get that tattooed on my forehead,” replies Tim. Yeah, well, we could also get “Doodseskader deserves so much better” tattooed. The gig finally resumes to warm applause with the furious Celebrity Culture Simp Farm, aka “the song where we scream ‘we’re fucked’”. “Life is like a technical issue,” Tim begins to tell us; we’re expecting a funny punchline, but he continues “…I just want it to stop.” His way of introducing Please Just Make it Stop reveals a heavy mood, something oppressive and suffocating.
Between tracks, Doodseskader leave us in the dark for a few instants; their 45 logo glows on the screen whilst oppressive layers of sound provide moments of introspection, as if they needed to immerse themselves in the mood the track demands. The rage is there, seething, but the atmosphere is one of unease and despair. Their voices echo one another, between bursts of violence and haunting refrains. Ideas follow one another, constantly fresh, and unless you know the tracks, it’s impossible to predict which direction they’ll take.
The atmosphere in the crowd is heating up. The aggressive behaviour of one or two lads in the pit is starting to ruin the mood for everyone else. Doodseskader deserve so much better. “This isn’t a Roméo Elvis gig – nobody gets touched unless they want to,” says Tim, defusing the situation, to more applause. You can also sense, coming from the crowd, a desire to support these two artists, to let them know just how special and necessary what they do is, and it’s rather touching... Finally, there are also the few annoying guys who spend the concert talking loudly and showing off at the bar, their voices ruining the moments of silence. Doodseskader deserve so much better.
On stage, there are two guys giving it their all, laying their hearts bare, offering something unique, authentic and deeply personal – a mutating entity whose suffering is sublimated by music which, in its violence and torment, acts as a healing balm. Doodseskader seems to bleed every note, every word, to sweat every particle of their soul to offer it to us without pretence, with an integrity that borders on self-endangerment: managing to exude such power and so much vulnerability is nothing short of a miracle, a fragile and acrobatic balancing act.
We were celebrating the release of The Change is Me, and its tracks keep going: the hypnotic choruses of Weaponizing my Failure, the massive, ultra-intense techno beatdown of the finale to No Laughter in Me, and the biting frenzy of It Keeps on Stinging filled the air at Point Éphémère. To round things off, we take a step back with two “old” tracks: The Sheer Horror of the Human Condition and the unmissable FLF, just to finish us off with a merciless, ultra-heavy wall of noise/rap/industrial where the Flemish slams home like never before.
So yeah, obviously, it was brilliant. Doodseskader didn’t just release the best album of the year; they’re also a band you absolutely must see live for their frenzied energy, their authenticity, their approach of absolute honesty that feels like an exorcism, and their musical offering—a storm of emotions, sounds and creative flourishes. Eventually, the curse will be broken; eventually, life will give them back everything they give. We’ve received all of that from them, this sharing. They continue to deserve better. But this bittersweet feeling, ultimately, suits them better than any label or word: Doodseskader reminds us that this is life, in all its injustices, and that this is also what makes humanity beautiful – when it is honest about its imperfections and scars. We can't wait to see them again, very soon,opening for Health at the end of the year!
