There’s no experience quite like attending a 100 gecs show – you never really know exactly what’s going to happen, but there’s a guarantee of something truly bizarre and exceptional,and the band’s show at Roadrunner in Boston is yet another gathering of the fantastically weird fanbase the hyper-pop duo has cultivated around their music. The hi-jinks begin even before the first act – at exactly 7:25pm, 35 minutes before a single note of live music has been played, the crowd spontaneously starts chanting, “One more song!” multiple times, and soon the three-part exclamation is joined by a harmonica chiming in with exactly one note of accompaniment.
Throughout the buildup to Machine Girl’s opening set there’s a constant stream of alternating oohs and aahs of approval and disapproval, the reason for which is unclear though it does seem like the center of the room is playing a kind of large-scale game from someone’s phone. It almost has the feel of a convention more than a concert: neon and pastel colors abound, and people are dressed up in all sorts of different outfits including wizard hats and robes modeled after the band’s usual garb. There’s a trans pride flag hoisted high towards the front, and another in the center of the balcony. Machine Girl answers the crowd’s energy by taking the stage a couple of minutes early, and by the end of their half-hour set vocalist Matt Stephenson has spent at least a third of that span among the crowd, or hovering above them hanging from one of the fixtures on the side of the room, dozens of feet from the stage.
Somehow, things only escalate from there – the unmistakable shape of an inflatable man rises above the crowd during the changeover between Machine Girl and 100 gecs. When Laura Les and Dylan Brady finally arrive onstage, surrounded on all sides by LEDs and wearing their own wizard robes, the balloon man takes to the skies. The night begins in the same way as the latest 100 gecs album, 10,000 gecs – an eardrum-vibrating rendition of the THX intro sound that presaged countless movies in the collective memory of the 90s, which dissolves into ‘Dumbest Girl Alive’, Les’ self-effacing and stellar opening track, perhaps the brightest spot on an album that generally goes from strength to strength. If there’s one recurring question that comes from places external to hyperpop, it’s about the genre’s long-term appeal, and whether it’s just a fad – this can be forgiven considering the genre initially seems to only coalesce around a particular style of vocal manipulation and production; but in reality, 100 gecs have spent the seven years following their first EP making the case that there’s incredible potential to be mined from a multitude of new machinations they’ve both introduced and refined in that time.
10,000 gecs asks the question: what is the common thread between nu metal, jock jams, ska, skramz, and whatever you’d call Primus? The answer: nothing, at least until Les and Brady
decided there was. The album makes good on the promise of the songs the duo previewed on their tour in 2021, to continue pushing the boundaries of not only what is possible, but what is imaginable in this glorious collision of influences. The new album is enough to do what once, at the peak of 1000 gecs fervor, seemed impossible – exceeding the virality of megahits like ‘money machine’ and ‘stupid horse’, the latter of which appears particularly early in the night. In fact, ‘stupid horse’ is followed immediately by another animal-inspired jaunt, the lighthearted ‘Frog on the Floor’, and while it’s impossible to discern from the outside, video of the show reveals that someone did in fact bring a plush green frog who rested on Roadrunner’s floor during the song, surrounded by a circle pit of fans bowing in reverence to it. While nothing quite approached the dizzying absurdity of the time a pair played Magic: the Gathering in a Machine Girl pit, someone in Boston continued the great tradition of documenting Gecs shows on increasingly-unlikely devices, this time Sony’s obsolete handheld, the PlayStation Vita.
There’s a fair bit of gadgetry onstage as well, with Brady having two microphones to hand for most if not all of the early songs, no doubt each weaving his vocals through different forms of processing; and as the night continues the pair make increased use of mics with GoPro cameras affixed to their ends, broadcasting fish-eyed live feeds to the massive screen behind Les and Brady. The screen also broadcasts a wealth of visuals to accompany each song, from explosions to a nightmarish, distorted visual of a dental x-ray during ‘I Got My Tooth Removed’, an “nth-wave” ska song that’s about exactly what it claims to be in the title. Every track from the new record is played by the end of the night, and at only 30 minutes in length it’s one of the strongest records of the year in a compact package, a collection of abrupt twists and turns from one style to another that has something for everyone, even Anthony Kiedis.
Before ‘One Million Dollars’, Les retrieves a guitar and someone wheels out a mysterious cloaked object past Brady’s trashcan-dwelling keys and into the center of the stage. It ends up being something resembling a singing saw that Brady wields while the two play an interlude, backlit to cast long shadows out into the audience. Then Les shreds her guitar during the outro of this sequence and Brady takes to whipping the instrument until they move on to ‘Doritos & Fritos’. ‘xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx’ is a reminder from 1000 gecs of an instance when the band played it quite close to their influences, channeling the style of early-2000s acts like Basshunter before it lurches into its glitchy second section. Viewing from above, between crowd-surfing young people every now and then one can glimpse an oddity like a bejeweled cowboy hat bobbing up and down, or the telltale little wisp of smoke from a vape pen rising up to get illuminated briefly by the LEDs.
The final run of songs is a series of beloved 100 gecs cuts, including a dip back to their first self-titled EP with ‘bloodstains’. And while the big singalong moment of ‘money machine’ is of course Les’ lightning-quick intro, it’s also a reminder that Brady’s verse and disaffected delivery on the song are among the finest moments in the entire band’s catalog. They close with ‘gec 2 Ü’, which also concluded 1000 gecs back in 2019. That album made Les and Brady – and a certain tree in a suburb of Chicago – figureheads in an emerging, volatile style of music, and there’s really no telling exactly how far the broader genre will go – but considering the cross-generational adoration for the style that has built up around 100 gecs and their contemporaries, 100,000 gecs is probably a matter of when, not if. In recent years the duo of 100 gecs has partnered both with titans of the last wave of electronic music, such as Skrillex, as well as those rising in the next like Alice Longyuo Gao, who has seen tracks produced and remixed by Brady and Les, respectively. This unpredictable, mutant musical movement may exist on the cutting edge of novelty, but its roots run deep in cultural memory – and with a genealogy like that and a deeply inclusive community built around it, 100 gecs remain an integral part of something wonderfully grand and strange.
Review and Photos by Collin Heroux
