Mosh up

kdsorceress tipped me off to a World/Inferno Friendship Society concert at the Paradise. Their frontman, Jack Terricloth, is an oily, charismatic preacher-man with a syrupy American-Morrissey voice and a narrow suit with a narrow tie. The titular "society" is a rotating lineup of thirty-some musicians — we were graced with the dreadlocked Sandra Malak on five-string bass, Leslie Wacker of Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band on alto sax, Rebecca Schlappich on violin, Boston's own Mora Precarious (with her Aimee Mann hair, red tie, and waistcoat) on drums, plus a keyboardist and a guitarist I haven't been able to ID. They play what Wikipedia calls "cabaret punk" and I call a deft dance across genres given a patina of punk, all amped-up, cranked-up, intense, and tight. I might have to get their latest album (The Anarchy and the Ecstasy), since it has my favorite number from the concert (Thirteen Years Without Peter King) and a song about Philip K. Dick (Canonize Philip K. Dick, OK).

From our vantage in the balcony, we were able to observe moshing and crowd-surfing from above. If I were writing a treatise on natural philosophy, this is what I would say:

The pit is a single, multicameral organism, straining mindlessly toward contact with a single tropistic focus — Jack Terricloth, in this case. Ecstatic waves and contractions pulse through its body, as its constituent elements jockey for position. It encapsulates elements of itself and moves them toward the focus, buoying them forward on erratic ripples of cilia and, sometimes, depositing them on the stage, from which they are tossed back into the pit by the helping hands of bouncer antibodies. Once, or maybe twice, the organism achieves its goal: a single element is thrust up from the mass, like a ship's figurehead, to the level of the focus's eyes — an emergent consciousness, a metonymous emissary from the mass, able to connect one-on-one with the focus in a way the crowd cannot. The focus addresses the emissary, their eyes locked, outstretched hands touching or not-touching, and the entire organism (even those posers watching from the balcony) receives the chrism of that personal attention. Then the emissary subsides into the protoplasm again, immediately lost, and the thrashing commences anew.

The first opening act was a pretty kickass Irish-punk Dropkick Murphys-wannabe; the crowd did an adorable/alarming high-speed leprechaun circle-prance in the middle of the floor, and I did the fastest pas de basque I've ever done. The second was an aging reggae Muppet-man drowned by a thundering bass and drum kit; it was hard to connect to, but that smiling guy's hands fluttered over his guitar like a dreaming marionette's.

Damn fine show. Glad I went.