Knock Their Socks Loose

Knocked Loose performing at Emo's. (Photo by John Anderson)

Next time you have the fear of God body-slammed into you, I am asking that you have perspective and that you give thanks.

Indeed, when a hardcore show emerges a sweaty, cathartic triumph – an outcome that even the most brutal band on the planet cannot guarantee without an equally committed crowd – the victory is at heart always a deeply improbable one. Just as it’s true that no other concertgoing experience is so clearly reverse engineered from the human desire for communal release… are there many worldly activities that our future alien overlords are gonna find goofier than fucking pit dancing? The burliest dudes/ladies/non-binary-folk on the planet – pupils practically quivering with adrenaline – and instead of using those big muscles to capture tonight’s dinner they’re charging around in a circle, spin-kicking the air, unintentionally attacking one another in their bizarre collective attempt to punch out HARMLESS SONIC VIBRATIONS. Human self awareness is a gloriously mercurial condition.

Indeed, to truly *attend* a hardcore show we must commit ourselves to the cleansing of unhappy, universal emotions through shared enactment of outwardly absurd, deeply niche, dummy-headed ritual. It’s a glorious pact between band and audience to go hard as balls, and for me, no moment better embodies this utopian pursuit than the “mosh call.” This is the part of the song where the frenzied riffing comes to a head and a space emerges for the vocalist to intelligibly say something an audience will agree upon as badass right before a suuuuuuuper heavy breakdown. Basically, this is a dog-whistle to go ape-shit. In context, that’s kinda a silly instruction! Lord knows, once that circle opens at the beginning of the show, it’s probably not gonna close prematurely unless somebody’s femur is jutting out. But think of the mosh-call as a meditative break, and it starts to seem sublime, even spiritual. It’s a directive to pause our individual pit-projects, give a thought to the joint imperative that has brought us all here (usually embodied in the mosh call itself, often some variation on “FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE”), and regather that energy in a united surge.

Some bands write deliberate mosh calls into each of their songs – maybe it’s the only way they know how to string together verses! – and still others will see their unintentional mosh calls revealed back to them through audience reaction. Louisville’s Knocked Loose, however, is probably the only band to ride a single mosh call to crossover prominence. On the bands 2016 track “Counting Worms,” when lead singer Bryan Garris barked like a canine to herald a particularly evil guitar part (talk about dog whistles…), he birthed what to this day remains the most enduring internet meme in hardcore. Should you be unenlightened at this time, please google “Knocked Loose arf arf.”

Perhaps aware that to dog in their heels and riff on their laurels as the “arf arf” band would not be conducive to their longevity, Knocked Loose spent the ensuing half-decade jousting for the title of “most ambitious band in hardcore.” The arrival of last year’s concept-record/song-suite/death-rock-opera A Tear in The Fabric of Life had appeared to signal that this crown would safely remain theirs for years to come, so be thankful they’ve carried their expansive mindset into the curation of the album’s supporting tour. Most big-ticket hardcore bands will select openers with an eye only towards warming the pit up for their headlining performance, calculatedly filling the bill with the lower horsepower land-cruisers of their specific sub-genre-lane. By contrast, Knocked Loose arrived at Emo’s Friday night supported by three bands whose shared commitment towards going hard straddled a remarkable range of styles. In that way, the four hour show sorta functioned as an extended mosh-calll, and oh boy, did Austin ever Arf Arf the fuck up.

Hardcore kids get loud at Emo's on Friday. (Photo by John Anderson)

“THIS IS LONG ISLAND!” In true Victory Records-album-from-1996 fashion, the first band of the night opened with a tuff-as-nails vocal sample loudly proselytizing the beat yr ass virtues of their hometown. However, the band in question – Knocked Loose’s freshly signed Pure Noise label mates Koyo – are about as ingratiating a hardcore band can be without having to reclassify as pop punk. The group's quicksilver tempos and heartfelt, angsty vocals suggest a triumphantly riffy DC Revolution Summer band beamed 40 years forward into the lineup for the When We Were Young festival. Alas, despite the stage-shuttling efforts of their vocalist – the perfectly named Joey Chiaramonte, dressed in a North Face polo that soon came off – I was left thinking this promising new band had room to grow its stage-game. Despite nominal counterbalancing from three guitarists, an overwhelmingly chunky bass tone swallowed the melodic thrum that vitalizes their records and muffled its potential for increased speed in live performance. When Chiarmonte frustratedly demanded “YOU GOTTA BE BOUNCIN! UP! UP!” it was hard not to look at the instrumentalists and wish they were taking sonic cues from the one guitarist who spent the night doing split-kicks.

Of course, not every band has to mirror their idealized audience energy to get it across. Case in point: Kublai Khan TX, whose steamroller groove metal doesn’t have to move faster than a few miles per hour to crush entire city blocks, so neither did they. Deeply quotable frontman Matt Honeycutt spent the entire performance leaning imposingly on his knee – the very definition of unruffled punk-rock righteousness – barking our hoarse instructions to “my people going wild in the middle” (“Who in this room is the lowest form of animal, I don’t know if anybody can prove it but if you wanna give it a shot?”) Other highlights saw the North Texas native taking time to shout out seemingly every city besides Austin, tossing off some cryptic politics (“tonight this is a dedication to our soil, our struggle,”) and telling his guitarist to “open up the trophy case and take out the rocket launcher.”

“We’d like to thank you for taking a break from violence to be sad with us tonight,” Movements leader Patrick Miranda said towards the end of his band’s astonishing set. Instantly, some variation on “NO! I CAME HERE TO CRY WITH YOU” could be heard from all across the floor. And no wonder. In 2022, the Orange County group might be the biggest contemporary name in real deal emo music. If the band wanted to captain their own four-band cross-country trek, their high-definition spin on chest-thumping, tear-jerking fourth-wave is fuel enough – surging with plenty of melodic sheen and anthemic heft leftover to burn. Much of that success must be accredited to Miranda’s gently shamanic extroversion and grand generosity of performance (it should go without saying these characteristics are usual for this genre), never missing a chance to turn the microphone around. In tandem with a band that was able to amp the energy without mis-servicing their leader’s songwriting fundamentals (take notes Koyo: this can be you), Miranda came dangerously close rendering his songbook of self-loathing emotional desolation peppy. When he closed the show by self-deprecatingly contrasting Movements with the headliners on deck – “Don’t worry, you can get back to beating the shit out of each other soon,” – you swore he must have missed the dudes in the back thrashing to the one about “the endless earthquakes in [his] head.”

Knocked Loose (Photo by John Anderson)

To be fair, if you’re playing with Knocked Loose every night, you know that nothing on Earth could quite compare with the blunt-force impact of their ominous graveyard metalcore – not even their albums (it’s worth noting this was the band’s first Austin date since 2017). If you’re in the habit of reading writing on hardcore (Hi!), you know how often frontman Bryan Garris’s piercing wail is unique in all of heavy music; it’s something all together different to see his vocals’ keening desperation manifest – like some fleeing prey – in his darting path all across the stage (you immediately understand why the drums are elevated on a platform and the guitarists pushed to the very perimeter). More than any specific breakdown, that sort of self-conscious melodrama is really Knocked Loose’s X-factor – the doomy exaggeration that renders their otherwise crushing doom broadly approachable (even as it clearly stems from tell that orientates stem from a place of real feeling; without slowing down, songs were dedicated to those who’ve suffered loss and Texas’s embattled LGBT community.)

Really, it’s just a shame the crowd couldn’t collectively pause to marvel at the exponentially incessant time signatures and the brute sophistication of each gnarled riff, as it was these very superlatives that drove Austin’s fiercest pit demons to glorious, blinding rage. Let’s just say there may have been a moment when there were more people crowd surfing than crowd to surf them, and that emo’s stage-front security team may have collectively aged several decades seeing the horde headed their way.

And yes, there was an Arf Arf. Everybody joined in. We all died. I call that community building.