!!! & We Are Hex

Dance-punk has always seemed like a contrived label. It tends to be dragged out to describe dance music that rocks too hard for most fans of dance music or punk rock with too much beat for most fans of punk. It’s a label that has been trudged out to try and categorize !!! throughout their career. Dance music is ostensibly a young man’s game, as is punk rock. The continued success of !!! is a testament to how few rules there really are. As the members of !!! have begun to enter their 40s, they are still an instant party, Nic Offer is still dancing like no one is watching, and they are still attracting a new crop of fans.

On Monday, July 28th, !!! played at The Bishop in Bloomington, IN to a crowd that mirrored this. Fans ranged from college-aged kids (even though school is still out in this college town) to baby boomers. !!! played mostly newer stuff, although this was at least partly because, as Nic Offer openly admitted, they had forgotten how to play most of the first half of their catalogue. However, people don’t go see !!! to hear the hits and go home. They go to dance, and it’s pretty much impossible not to when Nic Offer is leading the room. He’d frequently disappear into the crowd for lengthy instrumental sections. Who wants to dance alone anyway?

!!!’s catalogue is really more dance music than anything, but it’s played on rock instruments and has enough of an attitude to get lumped into one end of the dance-punk spectrum. The opener, Indianapolis band We Are Hex, is at the other end. They are really more of a hybrid of punk and early goth rock, but with a big enough beat that they might get lumped in there too. In fact, they had a lot to distinguish them from their peers. It’s rare that it’s worth paying attention to the individual playing of everyone in a punk band, but that was the case with We Are Hex. Singer Jilly Weiss wailed, danced, and generally played to a room much bigger than the one she was in. Drummer Brandon Beaver played danceable beats with the aggression of a rock drummer. The playing of both guitarist Matt Hagan and bassist Trevor Wathen was much tighter and more textured than is seen in most other heavy acts. Their spot-on interplay, surprisingly nuanced songwriting, and high energy set the bar for the night. Despite the professional feel, they had that seemingly dangerously high level of energy that usually comes with bands too green to have that much talent. This was largely courtesy of Weiss. You were never quite sure what could happen when she came down from the stage, and her on-stage antics were made all the more combustible by the white spotlights behind the stage that served as the only source of light, rendering her as a menacing silhouette in the darkness.

On record, you might not associate these acts together, but the feel was right live. !!! kept the energy up, and like We Are Hex, this was largely due to the singer. Like Weiss, Nic Offer seemed to be playing to an arena. Something about the other members of the band sometimes switching instruments with each other between songs helped the loose feel. Typically, !!! songs don’t crescendo. They usually lock into a groove, but occasionally touring member Sean McGahan would come from behind his electronics setup and push the crowd to a further level of hype. It’s always hard to wind down from a show like that, but it’s almost surreal to walk out into a sleepy, half-empty college town. That was the only disappointment; the hard reality that the party was over and going to the next lucky town.