The stage is dark. From the back of it’s acoustically treated main room Bust in the Crypt offers an auditory experience equal to that front row, morning full of high-pitched regret, in your face-in the moment experience that only green fresh eared newcomers to Lead-Metal seek out. Polar Bear and Big Cat sit half-assed on thigh-high bar stools talking in their pompous DIY argot that they had curated from different cultures and CPT shows over the years. Marveling and commenting at the crowds desire to watch The Expletives forthcoming performance through their CPT screens is necessary conversational repertoire for aged out, back of the room, by the bar, patrons such as Big Cat and Polar Bear. Big Cat understands them. Polar Bear does not. Big Cat was one of them, once. Drunk, excited, wishing to capture their moment in time with group of individuals that transcend the laws of nature, inebriation, talent, and society itself. A CPT recording is unalloyed evidence that screams out, in high fidelity VR quality resolution, I was here. I saw this.
Nothing insipid is ever recorded with a CPT, the digital memory necessary for a five second video numbers in the Petabytes, but if the moment is worth it a CPT recording is the perfect tool for preserving such a moment. It is the equivalent of catching a mermaid and keeping it in your living room fish tank, never having to eventually flush it down your toilet because the mermaid is digital and therefore, immortal.
The stage is dark. Then, as if summoned by the crowds anticipation a small red dot appears. The laser pointer’s beam directs the audience’s focus like a cat, shooting all over the room as if held by man with stage three Parkinson’s. Violently, just as soon as it appeared, the laser stops in the center of the The Expletives’ front man’s forehead, the scrofulous, the cantankerous, the long-tonged giraffe of his generation, Jack-Shit-Pretty.
The red beam illuminates Jack-Shit-Pretty’s ossicones and then with a painful slowness tails down to lock it’s glare between his eyes which stare with a disinterested profundity to the back of the room, through it’s wall, and past the curvature of the earth.
The red beam disappears.
His voice is sweet and smooth like half-and-half steamed with caramel Torani.
“Do you wanna- ”
- Boom, Jack-Shit is cut off by a deep kick of the bass drum accompanied by plumley purple light that floods the stage with complete illumination. The Expletives are all present and accounted for. The laser pointer was a classic bout of misdirection. Jack-Shit asks again.
“Do you wanna- ”
- Boom, same as before. The hit, the light. Only this time the crowd screams with a force so powerful Big Cat and Polar Bear have to plug their ears with unused torn-off cigarette butts. A trick Big Cat picked up in prison.
“Do you wanna- ”
The crowd thinks they know. They wait for the hit of plumley purple haze. Another ploy.
Replacing the bass drum hit is a wall of sonic lead that resembles white noise from the big bang and words that would make a corpse jealous.
“-fuck in a valley of corpses!RARRRRRRRRRRRRAWWWWWWWW!”
Flood lights from the ceiling shift on and lollipop stands rigged with 45 differently colored bass-drum triggered strobe LED’s are employed and show one of The Expletives’ Sleep is for the Weak tour is officially underway. Five shows, five different cities, no sleep. Big Cat and Polar Bear go for a smoke.