Piss: A band you should see, but that comes with a warning
At Left of the Dial festival in Rotterdam, there is a clear winner and really only one band name on anyone’s lips. Talk to any ticketholder, any band, any journalist, and they’d tell you that Piss were the act they were most looking forward to.
As a warning now, you have approximately one and a half minutes to giggle about the name and get over it. Despite the silliness of bands constantly telling me in interviews, “I love Piss!”, the Canadian act isn’t a joke. Nothing about them or their show is funny at all. In fact, the festival even warns people in advance.
“Half of our staff were in tears,” the event’s well-meaning trigger warning said as the organisers talked about their own first experience, even just listening to the band’s recordings. “From what we understand, their live performances can be quite intense, to put it mildly. If you’re sensitive to these kind of things, prepare yourself mentally, or bring a friend who understands the possible distressed reaction you might have to the show,” they wrote on the website and, as sadistic as it sounds, I knew I had to go.
If you’ll allow me to get personal for a moment, I will. Left of the Dial added to the warning that obviously, people who have been “lucky enough to prance through life happily and totally unscathed” are welcome at the band’s show, duh. I haven’t been one of those people, nor have a sickeningly high number of women. It’s devastating that I know the friends I’m with aren’t in the lucky bunch. It’s horrifying that I can pretty safely assume that the new friend I made and went to the show with isn’t either.
The band are aware of that too. Before they begin their set at Rotown, their singer, Taylor Zantingh, echoes the warning and lays down rules. While plenty of hardcore bands talk about helping people back up if they fall or general mosh pit safety, this is different. Instead, Zantingh sets up a system where anyone who wants to leave has to raise their hand, and the crowd must part to allow them out. It is known in the room that the rule is for emotions first. Everyone in the space comes into it, or is reminded then and there, that what they’re about to be pushed about by is likely not so much a rowdy crowd, but rough memories and intense reactions to them.
Once again, if you’ll allow me to get personal for a moment, I will. I’m pretty unshakable. PTSD shows up in different ways for different people. Some have flashbacks, some are hypersensitive to triggers, and some, like me, feel pretty much nothing. It takes a lot to get me – some would say it’s repression, some would say it’s psychological protection. However, I am always morbidly curious, watching films or reading books that bruise the bruise to see if anything noted for being distressing can actually touch me.
It’s rare. This Piss show did touch me, though. What’s launched is a show of incredible and powerful hardcore music. The band around Zantingh are strong. They’re neat even in total chaos, meaning that regardless, even if you didn’t want to pay attention to a word, you can get into it.
However, the words grab you by the throat. Some are screamed in a way that makes me wonder how on earth the band have managed a lengthy tour before this. Some are barely even whispered as Zantingh heaves for breath during spoken word pieces. Some are completely drowned out, especially during their final song, ‘I Keep Trying To Change The Ending’, as Zantingh seems to try and self-regulate, repeating “Horses. Soft hands. Singing”, only to be hit by the volume of the band and lost in it. That’s maybe the moment that gets me most – capturing the desire to get better or move forward or forget when your brain or the world around you won’t let you.
The world around us is a main character here, though, as I think what impacts me about Piss is that while Zantingh deals so vividly with the intense impact of sexual violence, she also refuses victim rhetoric, considering instead how no one should have to stomach it – they should be able to rage back.
“We have to find some way to keep the rapists off the street. There are different ways of doing it, law is only one way of doing it. I myself favour violence, deeply, I favour it. And the reason why I favourite it is that the law isn’t working, and as long as the law isn’t working, women who have been attacked, or are being attacked, need to be able to understand that they have a right to defend themselves,” a spoken word piece says before the band launches into another heavy track. There are speeches about how women need to understand that they’re not docile creatures, lyrics that screech for a way to attack back and sounds from the band that sound like the punch so many of us wish we could throw.
A Piss set gets you fired up like that, and I could feel my body buzzing despite it typically feeling dead and dull. Sparked up now, I could feel things. I could feel every word of ‘Blocking A Scene You Can’t Remember’ and as I looked around to see teary faces and people standing with their hands on their hearts, I knew the room could too.
It’s rare to see something like that, rarer still to feel it, and almost impossible to find a band who do it so palpably, so interestingly and so grippingly that people are going round town recommending their show, obsessively. Piss are a band you should see because they’re good, but overwhelmingly, the choir of voices spreading their name around understand that their show feels like one you should see – and now I’m joining the masses saying that too.
