Concert

Last Tuesday we went to a Thrice concert in Salt Lake. Jordan has loved this band almost ever since they started their career. He and his friends discovered them while in the 7^th grade and have faithfully followed them and practically worshiped them ever since. During our freshman year of college the band released their album Vheissu, and Jordan tried to convert me. I wouldn’t go for it. They have a pretty solid hard-rock/screamo resume, and I was not willing to give them a chance at the time. But in the past 4 or 5 years they have experimented with several different styles, and I absolutely love their two most recent albums, The Alchemy Index and Beggars, and I even now like Vheissu. Some of their older, harder stuff still rattles my nerves though, and I can’t handle very much of it.

It was fun to see Thrice live. This was, if you can believe it, only my second real rock concert (because Michael Buble does not count). And it was just what a rock concert should be. The setting was an old warehouse-looking building, layers of peeling black paint, crumbling brick dividing walls and cement floors, exposed electrical wires and air ducts. The air was hot and muggy, the smell of too many human bodies mixing with the sweet pungency of alcohol and a trace of cigarette smoke. This kind of place is really not my favorite to be, and heaven knows I hate the smell of alcohol, but in a way it added to the experience, because the building didn’t really matter—the decrepidness of my surroundings was insignificant compared to what was streaming and floating and streaking invisibly through the air.

Some people go to concerts to forget life, to leave their bodies behind; I go to find another connection with my senses. At this concert I could not only hear the music, I could feel it. It pulsed through the cement underneath my feet, it made the sleeves of my shirt vibrate, it rumbled and thrummed in my chest, the sound waves bouncing around in the empty space of my lungs. I could feel my eardrums, throbbing with the high volume of sounds, trying to catch every wave. I could feel my throat and my tongue as I sang, and because I couldn’t hear myself, I relished the feel of singing rather than the sound. Instead of ignoring my surroundings, I grounded myself in them. The life that the music painted an image of was composed of fragments of joy, sorrow, anger, and tinted with shades of unattainable idealism. But in pondering the details of existence the music brought back into focus the big picture—we are all here on this earth together, and even when our differences divide us, we still laugh, and cry, and sing for the same reasons.