Fidlar

Sometimes at a gig you catch yourself thinking how great it would be to experience that same show with the mindset and equipment of a teenager. A sponge-like forma mentis, a relaxed yet enthusiastic spirit, but above all the ears — meaning the chance to approach a live show without the baggage of consolidated cynicism and judgment, to still get carried away as if it were always the first time. Faking it costs nothing, really: just give the right cue to the inner child subletting some remote corner of your brain, and warming up to the occasion is easily done. With the body, though, there's no bluffing. Every one of us had our own more or less heroic phase, when deep in the churning crowd we could afford the luxury of some harmless youthful madness, leaving good sense with no say in the matter. Having been through that is already something precious to keep among our memories, while deluding ourselves that we can replicate such experiences indefinitely tends, if anything, towards the pathetic. All this long and tedious preamble to explain how, among the audience at the Turin show by Fidlar — the Los Angeles outfit's second Italian date, after their March stop in Milan — we took great care to proceed with absolute caution, watching with due affection the ranks of not-even-eighteen-year-olds who rushed to the middle of the floor beneath the stage for a pit worthy of the name, while being firmly determined to keep ourselves out of said fray.

The venue for the occasion — a novelty even for regulars like us on the city's tough (if not too tough) live scene — hadn't exactly made a great impression on us: tucked away at the end of a remote street in one of the city's less thrilling outskirts, bordered by a barrier of bed-frame skeletons in a slightly-past-its-prime urban-jungle style, set up outside a former industrial warehouse with a taste as eccentric as it was spartan — somewhere between a common squat and a provocative, ultra-poor, ultra-contemporary art gallery. Not bad, though, if you picture it as the theatre of operations for the wild American band, a perfect celebration of the very concept of "cheap", starting with the modest makeshift stage set up among the stalls and the warehouse of wooden fixtures, in a sort of big courtyard where we wouldn't have been surprised to see a few chickens pecking about. The role of the poultry, however, was reserved for all of us bystanders — at first few and free to wander between the bar area and the speakers blasting music at full volume, then packed together not without some trepidation into this second sector, at the mercy of the imminent tropical typhoon that was the local support band's performance and its retinue of devoted troublemakers.

Before things kicked off, though, more or less around the time we arrived (in line with the start time printed on our tickets, later flatly contradicted by the one printed on the event posters on site), two significant events had presented themselves to us with the evocative force of true epiphanies. First, the sight of Fidlar sitting together on the benches of the small refreshment area with a few local youths, laughing and joking without restraint, with a sizeable pile of discount 50cl beer cans on the table. Our strategy of a fleeting contact justified by emulation collapsed at birth, though, since the guy at the counter explained that those beers, plentiful in the fridge behind him, weren't the venue's but the band's own, guarded like treasure as if they were the gold of Fort Knox. Just a few minutes later, however, happily leaning against a barrier, we got the chance to make up for it right away: a chance exchange with the diminutive frontman Zac Carper, drawn towards the vans by our blazing King Tuff T-shirt: a couple of laughs and the relative compliments, gathered unexpectedly but with undeniable satisfaction.

Of the mayhem that broke out near the stage half an hour later, we've only given a hint. Let's not add much more, since it seems to us the openers and their gang of aficionados deserved nothing beyond blatant indifference. A feeling further unsettled by the unsavoury faces of the more hot-headed among those caught up in the wild mayhem, and even more so by the pair of idiots who evidently found it irresistible to throw firecrackers onto the floor just a few steps from our innocent feet. Luckily for us, as expected, the changeover between bands went hand in hand with a healthy turnover in the front rows, now more crowded but decidedly less menacing. Standing out for sheer enthusiasm was a trio of hairless, pimply little guys wearing presumably homemade T-shirts, sleeves cut off at the shoulder, with FIDLAR written in black UniPosca marker faithfully copied from the album cover. Having strategically positioned ourselves right beside the raised platform, our backs protected by the indispensable shield of the thundering speaker stack, we were able to follow the entire show while keeping both our muscles and bones, and our ears, safely intact. And it was, it must be said straight away, a show that lived up to expectations, both on and off the stage.

The opening one-two of "Cheap Beer"/"Stoked and Broke" broke the ice without hesitation, unleashing the four Californians in short pants and setting just the right pace for a crowd that, deep down, wasn't waiting for anything else. Adrenaline bursts with no frills and an extremely high anthemic quotient, the perfect calling card to present to a student crowd already in holiday mode. An idle, playful atmosphere magically conjured up by a band as jovial as few others right now: tiny Carper and drummer Max Kuehn, true icons of slacker musicianship, the other Kuehn in a Thin Lizzy T-shirt embodying the more hard-rock soul of the band (particularly pronounced live compared to the record, as underlined by the emphatic flourishes of his Gibson on "White on White"), and mild-mannered bassist Brandon Schwartzel carving out a modest role as spokesman, in a form of communication otherwise reduced to onomatopoeic bare bones or played out (almost entirely) on a physical level. Few deviations from the norm of a filthy, fun, slapdash garage-skate-punk, legitimate offspring of Germs and Descendents (paid tribute to with an admirable cover of "Suburban Home"): an almost pop "No Waves", betraying a distant love for the far less memorable Blink 182, and the dark drift of the more nihilistic "Whore".

If drummer Kuehn had his own little moment of glory, complete with an introduction, for the song dedicated to him, "Max Can't Surf", the informal star of an otherwise thoroughly democratic outfit was their frontman, Zac Carper: the most active in slapping hands left and right, playing his Fender "Burrito" (literally plastered with stickers) and thrashing about lying down like a wounded animal, taking real showers of beer and treating himself to the inevitable walk through the crowd, carried aloft and hoisted up at the peak moment to scream at the top of his lungs from atop one of the speaker stacks. The crowd's response never faltered: a pit that never really turned nasty, kept going non-stop, gusts of refrains sung as one, as in the case of "Blackout Stout" and its emblematic "I can't find my way home". The absence of compasses or firm points of reference as a genuine generational glue, far more than the theme of ruin (take the grim, hallucinated "Cocaine" for the obvious references), watered down by the quartet's happily slack-off nature. They also treated Italian fans to the gem of "The Punks are Finally Taking Acid", a loose, catatonic version of their usual standards, before the furious vocal call-and-response of the closing "Wake Bake Skate". This writer had a great deal of fun deluding himself into feeling like a kid again. In the frenzy of the finale, he took a microphone to the face and watched his glasses launch themselves into an improvised stage dive into the human throng. Nothing broken, just scrapes that honour the good old days and always look good on a résumé.

Ah, he also grabbed something else. The original can of Kralle Bräu Lager, used by Zac mostly to douse his face. The famous cheap beer, in other words, now a prized item in a major private collection.

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