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Rating:
IAMX: Live @ PPC, Graz (Austria) 12/13/2008. Date within the tour promoting the new single "Think of England": a track that anticipates the band's new album to be released next Spring.
The screen projects fast-paced, unclear, disturbing images: human figures contort into new forms, plays of light, geometric figures chasing each other endlessly.
On stage, there is space for four: Chris and his friends... a drum set, a guitar (which sometimes becomes a bass to then return to being a guitar), and a captivating keyboardist/DJ/cubist girl, etc. etc. On the left, at the back, the amiable synth of the former Pimps, on the right, hanging, the inevitable fetish luck-bringing little horse. We are in front, 500 of us, squeezed in a place that feels so much like a post-industrial warehouse with a thick layer of smoke above us (we are not in Italy, I remember...).
The sound suggestions are those suspended between the eighties' echoes of the never-loved-enough Cocteau Twins, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, and the contemporaneity of the fast-paced electronic post-nineties rhythms. The music of IAMX is like this: goth but pounding, decadent but (almost) dance.
Just under two hours of emo-electronica that Chris Corner shoots directly and mercilessly into our minds and emotions. The four of them and us 500 exchanging sensations: dancing and singing every track at the top of our lungs. If it is only synthetic music, never has fiction been more real, and it is a matter of life or death to believe in these melodic lies. "After every Party I die" one of the tracks states, and going back home, for a moment, one might believe it. At least until reality peeks through: like realizing that what you have just seen was tremendously real.
Real was Chris's voice, real was his microphone giving voice to the front row, real was his body in the final stage dive. Real were the band's guys playing, real even their climbing onto the monitors to give the time to the audience and, I want to believe, real even the "little machines".
Real was our being X.
Mo.
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