Clad in a green plaid shirt and black jeans and sporting an Aniston-quality mane and a rather dashing moustache, Violent Bullshit lead singer Jayson Green looked like a friendly pirate as he called out the Saturday night crowd at Death By Audio for standing too far from the stage. A few of us stepped up, and someone knocked a full can of PBR onto the floor next to a mess of cheap extension cords and power strips. Soon after, the Bullshit commenced sending candied arcs of hardcore into the room, like a malfunctioning fireworks display that has everyone running for cover and smiling at once.
“No one in my band understands me,” which coincidentally was the number that got the musician-heavy crowd dancing, expresses the essence of the band: goofball sensitivity wrapped in torn vocal cords, like sonic Devils on Horseback. Other songs included “Seattle, Fuck Off,” Green’s response to that most unoffending of American cities, “Broseph Campbell,” which screams for itself, and “Keep the Change,” after which Green said, with near-Biafran aplomb, “if you like Obama, you like the cops.”
After the show, VBS guitarist Dan Mitha said “we relish the fact that we’re five guys who don’t look alike. People might think, ‘how do these guys know each other?’ We have fun with that.” He’s right on both counts: with two longhaired and three close-cropped members, the band looks as diverse as the ever-zooming contents of the cultural landscape it somehow encapsulates. And being in the center of the maelstrom is fun—Violent Bullshit, a band whose name gets it and gets it some more, makes sure of that with a playful, cymbal-punishing approach to the phenomena that plague, entertain, and inspire us.
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