God afton, reader(s). That’s Swedish for “good evening”. I apologize if it’s not evening where you are as you read these words. Either way, howdy.

I haven’t written anything in a long while, and I always bother to mention that every time I do finally write something, so I suppose it’s a meaningless thing to mention, but does anything really have meaning?

Anyway, I’m here to write, and you’re here to read (presumably), so let’s get to it.

If you’ve read more than 3-4 of the things I’ve written for this blog, you should, at the very least, know these two Things About Me:

1. I love music (live music in particular) more than anything on this planet/simulation other than family and friends. Music is my religion, and live music is my praise and worship service, my tent revival, my communion, my High Holidays, and every other significant religious thing I don’t know anything about rolled into one. Being in a like-minded crowd experiencing a band I love is what saves me. It keeps me from giving up, it keeps me (relatively) sane, and it keeps me from, for example, losing my shit on the kid with the dumb haircut who kept dropping, spilling, and throwing stuff all over the ground, all while flipping his dumb bangs out of his dumb face, even though his dumb hair wasn’t long enough to impede his dumb vision in any kind of way. But that’s a story for later, although its inclusion to the #1 Thing About Me is a perfect transition into the second Thing About Me…
2. I can be long-winded as shit, especially in my writing, and sometimes the point I reach at the end of a thing is not exactly the point I set out to make, but remember: it’s about the journey, not the destination, or something like that.

I say all that to say this:

Mrs. Circlepit and I recently attended our third full (fourth partial) Louder Than Life weekend in our home-away-from home, Louisville, KY, and it was an overall positive-to-amazing experience peppered with some disappointing-to-really-shitty moments, and I intend to write an in-depth thing (it’ll more likely be multiple things, given the #2 up above)(heh, “#2”) about all that very soon (keep an eye out for the kid with the dumb haircut!), but that’s not why I’m here today.

I’m here today to mention one performance from one band that I haven’t really seen mentioned in any of the reviews I’ve read of the weekend, and that band is metallic hardcore juggernaut and pride of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jesus Piece.

For some reason, Jesus Piece was given the headlining slot on a dinky li’l stage off to the side of the festival grounds (the “Road Hounds” stage, in LTL parlance) rather than an earlier slot on a bigger stage in front of a bigger crowd, which they absolutely deserve. And while I was bummed that it overlapped with Whitechapel on the “Disruptor” stage, I wasn’t gonna miss Jesus Piece for anything once I made it inside that gate. We booked over to the stage, arriving at 6:23 pm and were delighted to be in the shade (shade is hard to come by in the General Admission area of the Highland Festival Grounds). I have to believe the shadow cast at that time of day (at that time of year, in that part of the country, localized entirely in front of that stage) worked in the band’s favor, as there was a sizeable crowd sitting in that shade, which gave the band a larger audience that they likely would’ve otherwise had, going up against Pierce the Veil and Whitechapel as they were.

I digress.

We waited patienly along with 50-or-so other people while the band finished up their soundcheck, then they exited the stage as the crowd steadly grew larger, including the requisite disphits who somehow always manage to find their way in front of me to have a conversation while the band is playing (I recently learned that in concert-goer parlance, those people are known as “chompers”, a term that, when searched, results in far more results including the band Phish than I’m comfortable with), and at 6:30 on the dot, the band came back out, frontman Aaron Heard said something along the lines of “what’s up everyone? Thanks for checking us out”, and then he encouraged everyone to move closer, and then one of the most breath-taking and chaotic things I’ve ever experienced played out over the next 30 minutes, and I am a better person for having been a part of it.

I’ll admit I was wary of getting too close to the stage, as all the footage I’ve watched of Jesus Piece performing live has been…”intense” kinda works, but it’s not really strong enough to capture it properly. People are moshing across the stage and diving off it from the beginning of the first note until the end, and everything happening around those people is fuckin wild, y’all!

To the uninitiated, the pit might resemble a level from the SNES classic beat em up Final Fight.

And aside from the number of people involved, that’s a fairly accurate representation. Here’s one of my favorite videos of the band doing what they do best.

So yeah, the idea of being in a crowd like this, while still thrilling, is also intimidating as fuck for a chubby out-of-shape dude in his mid-forties. I’ll admit the karate kicks and wild punches going on in the crowd seem a bit much, but the people partaking in it are all the fuck about it. Everyone involved is a willing participant, and I guarantee you every one of them felt better after this show, even if they couldn’t walk as fast. Plus, according to a statistic I just made up, but which is probably accurate, crowds like this are approximately 80% less likely to erupt into actual violence than any roughly equal-sized segment of the audience at your average bro-country arena concert.

I’ve gotten a bit off track here again. I was trying to talk about how much Jesus Piece fucking ruled. It was a lot. I’m not great with crowd sizes, but I figure the number of people actively watching them at least tripled during their performance. And bonus for me: the chatty Cathys in front of me fucked off somewhere else about halfway into the set, and I finally had an unfettered view of the carnage that is Jesus Piece live. Well, as unfettered as it could be given the small but mighty dust storm whipped up by karate pit.

Mostly clear eyes, completely full heart, can’t lose.

Anywise, I’ll be writing more about Jesus Piece another time as well, but I couldn’t let another moment pass without at least attempting to share the good news.

I told you I could be long-winded. The point is, you should check out Jesus Piece, and you should check back here for more about Louder Than Life 2023, coming as soon as I’m not too tired to start writing about it. Thanks for reading.