It’s all red inside Cambridge’s Sinclair nightclub as Heart Attack Man takes the stage. Is it perhaps an homage to the title of their latest record, Fake Blood? Or the red-hot anger of youth that the band channels? It’s hard to tell, but what’s readily evident is that the band, helmed by frontman Eric Egan, came to tear the house down, part of a truly stacked four-band tour with UK alt-punk rockers Boston Manor.
Named for a Beastie Boys track and playing music that’s indebted to the fury of punk and the charged lyricism of emo music, Heart Attack Man are a band for the modern era. Online, one can find Egan rattling off standard news like tour announcements, merch updates, and set times in short Instagram videos, beginning in the practiced demeanor of a YouTube star only to gradually escalate his voice to a primal scream by the end, or inter-cut the messages with manic takes of the same announcement. He’s a millennial’s millennial for sure, steeped in the dadaist type of comedy that the current generation has grown up with as a defense mechanism against the problems they’ve inherited. “My uncertainty is everlasting and perennial, because I’m a millennial,” he says on ‘100mg’, encapsulating the unsure footing of both youth in general and this generation’s specific woes.
Active since 2014, Heart Attack Man came into their own with the release of 2017’s The Manson Family. Laden with fuzzy guitars, Egan and company capture the angst of youth perfectly, and even when the lyrics are plain as day, as on the downbeat ‘Life Sucks’, it only serves to heighten their emotional impact. This year’s Fake Blood finds the band getting even more restless under their skin, and working with an even more expansive sound that’s hallmarked by soaring guitars in the title track, which opens the record in stunning fashion.
Fake Blood is the band’s focus during their performance, bringing out many tracks from what is sure to be one of their most enduring albums. Set opener ‘Sugar Coated’ begins with panned guitars and the iconic lyrical couplet, “Hey what’s up / I hate your guts”, and concludes with the statement that, “You want it sugar-coated but this feels so cathartic”. It’s easy to see why the band chose to open with this song, as its unfiltered sentiments speak to the aim of their music as a whole. The blistering anger of these songs is balanced slightly by Egan’s willingness to be self-effacing, like on ‘Low Hanging Fruit’, or ‘Out For Blood’, which comes off as the most angry song on the entire record, although Egan confesses it’s simply based on a Michael Douglas movie from the 90s.
Egan’s wide eyed energy fuels the mosh pit that seemingly lasts for the entire set, young people jumping up and down, many of whom are wearing the trademark orange beanie that Egan appears in so often online. Those little orange markers are ferried on a sea of hands up close to the stage before being helped down gently by venue staff, who shepherd eager crowd-surfers down from the sky. In advance of ‘Crisis Actor’, which is carried by noisy, almost sludgy riffs and Egan’s most guttural vocal delivery, he demands the crowd form a circle pit, and for the closing song tells them to not let their feet hit the floor.
In the end, it’s hard to encapsulate every thematic note that Fake Blood and Heart Attack Man as a whole touch on, but what’s certain is that raw, angry music is alive and well for a new generation in this band, arguably as it should be considering the current state of things. From toxic relationships like the manipulative threats Egan rails against in ‘Cut My Losses’, to the more global anxieties found in ‘100mg’, Heart Attack Man’s music cuts through any semblance of artifice for a hard look inside the beating, ugly heart of the world.
Review and Photos by Collin Heroux
