A few days after the Psychadelic Porn Crumpets came to Chicago, showing off their fiery new album And Now for the Whatchamacallit, I was walking into an office in downtown Chicago for an interview. Last on a long list of meetings was a a lunch date with two people who held the same job as the one I was trying to sell myself into by trumpeting every project I've been a part of over the past few years. That part was over, at this point, I needed to show what the person in me likes to do with their time and talk about stuff that would likely fall to the wayside once the 12 hour work days come around. The conversation shifted towards music around the city, and inevitably to the factory of sound that is Lincoln Hall. "I was there the other night!", I blurted out without thinking of the obvious question that would come in response to that, leading to me having to talk about the Porn Crumpets by name without knowing where these two lied on the spectrum between Public Enemy soundtracked daily office rebellion to thinking we've only been making music to poison the minds of children since Debusy died in 1918. Typically, you don't tend to care too much about where people lie on that spectrum, most of us are in the middle and the stakes are no where near this high. Instead, I mumbled something incomprehensible and forced the converstion in another direction - sticking the landing like a gymnast standing up after belly flopping off of a balance beam.
Undue self-praise aside, that night at Lincoln Hall needed to be given its due justice. The show itself was a crater of joy and energy. The Perth-based four piece tore immediately into High Visceral cuts "Surf's Up" and "Found God in a Tomato" as the crowd began to liquify. Three songs into the set, a student asked me to hold his backpack with my camera bag so that he could dive in and take-in the distorted jam session with the rest of the crowd without worrying about a crushed laptop. "Bill's Mandolin", the second single off of the groups latest LP, was met by a battle cry from the audience vocally marching along to the cadence of the bouncy anthem. The set filled the room with dizzying jams and the deserved excitement that should come from the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets passing through any city.
The right thing to say when asked about who I saw the other night at Lincoln Hall, in any context, would be "Psychedelic Porn Crumpets. It was incredible, and I'm bringing my grandmother next time."
