Live Review: Lip Critic - Headrow House, Leeds [25th August 2024]

Words: Callie Petch

If you’re reading this piece, I’m going to assume you’re a nerd. It’s OK, I’m one too. We music fans all are. Inherently, we are much more nerdy and weird about music than a good 90% of people who go through their daily lives. As such, and even with the Internet having spent the last two decades attempting to break them down into meaninglessness, we tend to make a habit of trying to assign music into clearly discernible genres. Despite their definitions being much slipperier nowadays, we still like to affix simple tags to the music we discuss so that neophytes at a glance are able to get some idea of what it sounds like. Plus, it just looks neat and tidy and organised on a spreadsheet or iTunes library. (OK, maybe that last one is just me.)

Then along comes a band like Lip Critic which seems to actively revel in making such a task near-impossible. How the fuck am I supposed to reduce a band like this down to, at most, two pithy generalised words? Hailing from New York City, vocalist Bret Kaser, producer Connor Kleitz, and drummers Danny Eberle & Ilan Natter create the kind of music that requires enough hyphenates to exhaust the world’s natural supply. If you wanted to get supremely redundant, “hardcore” covers their general vibe though the music they make barely resembles the traditional genre. “Hardcore industrial electronic rap rock noise jungle metal” is the closest I can get to encompassing the sound of debut album Hex Dealer, at least without invoking the spectre of Money Store-era Death Grips which is arguably their closest antecedent.

Photo by Callie Petch.

Then again, to spend so much time fixating on what regimented genre they sound like or trying to box them is to entirely miss the point. This is music designed to swing relentless haymakers across the jaw of a listener. Overwhelm with such concussive force, relentless energy, ever wilder sound collages, screeching left-turns, and surprising hooks that you finish a spin like you just stepped out of a hurricane exclaiming in shocked glee “what the FUCK was THAT?!” I was first turned onto Hex Dealer because someone I follow on Twitter whose music taste I respect called it their favourite album of the year so far without much further extrapolation, and my first listen was a near-equal measure of bewilderment and furious seated headbanging. Over constant future spins in the days and weeks following, both sides of that response grew ever larger albeit with the general bewilderment instead evolving into “how the hell does anybody write and play music like this?!”

After attending Lip Critic’s UK tour opener at Headrow House in Leeds, I’m still yet to get an answer to those questions. Eberle and Natter’s drum kits sit either side of a central bank of samplers and electronics that Kleitz and Kaser smash into the buttons of as if torturing these machines to death is the only way to wrangle the required noises out of them. Within about thirty seconds of set opener “Love Will Redeem You,” Kleitz practically cannonballs into the crowd so he can do a headstand before sprinting back on stage and triggering the start of an audio blitz which does not truly subside until show’s end 35 minutes later. Both drummers keep the chaos firmly locked in time yet attack their kits with such anger that it’s almost like they’re resentful of needing to provide some semblance of order instead of joining the mayhem.

Photo by Callie Petch.

The specifics of what Kaser is alternately rapping, shouting, screaming, or saying are somewhat lost in both the live mix and his machine gun delivery. Regardless, he is a mesmerising presence. Striking hammy poses, dragging himself along the venue floor as if making “the water in the desert” of “Sermon,” gangly flailing his limbs around with microphone pressed to mouth like Zach de la Rocha. He begins the set by claiming that he is “taking you all to jail!” due to the Monopoly branding around Leeds, thanks the support band Cellar Messiah by jokingly noting “it’s nice to have another American band on tour” in a mock Australian accent, and introduces “6 Foot Tongue” by expressing a desire to “shake our collective asses” with giddy glee. It’s almost enough to overshadow the bit where Kleitz decides to do pull-ups on the pipe overhanging the stage mid-song, as if the power of the music is unleashing a spontaneous desire to manifest some gains.

The assembled crowd, after an initial period of adjustment, are well into it. When the moshpit finally starts up during loosie “The Loan,” it feels like a natural boiling over point from all the momentum accrued up to then. Even before that, it’s an incredibly fun experience, faithfully bottling the sensation of being Power Slap-ped around the face by a gorilla from their recorded output. It also contains a couple of surprising shifts of its own, like when “Milky Max” – which sonically resembles the evil sibling of Robyn’s “Cobrastyle” (and I promise that comparison made sense in my head) – suddenly downshifts into a doom metal outro not on the album. The one reprieve all night is only one on-paper, when the band pauses for a full-minute between both parts of “Dreamland” in increasingly awkward frozen silence that the crowd mostly respects with growing anticipation.

So, I may be no closer to figuring out how to categorise Lip Critic or how they even begin to write the hellacious bombs of aural atomisation they hath wrought. But after a short, sharp, sensational show like that, does it really matter? Some things should defy categorisation, and some hurricanes are just freaks of nature you can’t reason with.