Concert Review: Drain Gang @ Metro Chicago 4/2/2022
and other diary entries from that day
I fully endorse mild trespassing while hiking, trespassing that lets you see interesting parts of the world in which you live, but on the morning of April 2nd 2022 I was not trespassing. Near me, there is a small prairie restoration area that’s owned by a local utility company, not by the county, so it’s private land. Occasionally, they’ll offer a guided hike of that area, led by a volunteer group. I’d always wanted to see it, so as last year’s spring broke and the plants started to reawaken I decided it was time.
The morning was cold, just under forty degrees, and it rained on and off. I listened to Big Thief on the drive to the hike. I pulled around the back of the building to the location designated by the Facebook event. There were about five other cars already there. One of them was a minivan that was covered in stickers about the ethical imperatives of veganism, which once they exited their car I found out belonged to a couple around the same age as my parents. Even though I’m vegan too I didn’t talk to them about it. I didn’t talk to anyone about anything really. We walked around the prairie, rain lightly coming down. I took pictures with my DSLR which could explain why I wasn’t talking much. The prairie wasn’t that special in the photos, so I was more taking pictures for the sake of doing something with my hands.
The main subject the group talked about was plants. One lady was an expert on native plants, or at least talked as if she was. She identified a lot of plants for us and told them which ones she liked to use for her natural medicine. I tried to pay attention because I love the idea of eating plants from the wild, taking food directly from the earth. But nothing seemed definitive. Most of the plants seemed to just be good for “clearing sinuses” if you put it in tea. She told us how she thought mushrooms were an alien lifeform that came to Earth from an asteroid and I thought that made the most sense of anything she said. The male in the vegan couple had a bigger DSLR than mine that he’d use to take pictures of the plants she talked about.
We didn’t move fast on the hike because the average age was 45, including me as a major outlier bringing the average down. When the group would stop to talk, the volunteer hike leader would stop to pull invasive plants from the prairie. He explained his vision for the restoration, how it would take decades to complete. He was retired, presumably in his 60s, doing this as a project to fill his time. And I was impressed, and sad too, and his commitment to this small piece of somewhat unremarkable land. Making it beautiful and true, true to what it used to be.
After the hike I went to my parents’ house and had lunch, and then started driving to Chicago. I had purchased tickets to the Drain Gang show in Chicago months prior, after the release of The Fool. I started listening to Bladee in 2020 when 333 came out, because of its incredible album cover. I would wander around empty parks in summer 2020 listening to 333. I didn’t like his followup album Good Luck, which was too christian rock for me. But I really liked his summer 2021 album The Fool, even more than I liked 333. The Fool took the themes of 333 and sharpened them with stronger and more emotional songs.
These two albums are much different than the core of Bladee’s discography and his Drain Gang collective. Morally different, sonically different. I had listened to a few songs off Bladee’s earlier albums and found some of them fun but didn’t vibe with the world as much. As the date approached I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to go to the Drain Gang show, because I knew it would heavily featured other artists besides Bladee who I didn’t know that much. Right when the tour began, Bladee released a collaboration album, Crest, with Ecco2k another Drain Gang membr, who was heavily featured on Bladee’s earlier work. I liked Crest, its more ethereal and rehearsed take on the world of The Fool, so I decided to go, to see Bladee and Ecco together right after its release.
I got to Chicago early enough to have dinner. I listened to Charli XCX nightcore remixes as I drove on Lakeshore Drive and looked out my car window at the tall buildings. The Drain Gang show was at the Metro, in the Wrigleyville area. I get anxious about parking in cities, especially Chicago, so I always pre-order a spot online. When I reached my pre-ordered parking spot it was small and tight. As I tried to back in, I scraped my car door on a brick wall and horribly scratched it. I still wasn’t parked well and I was embarrassed so I gave up and booked a different spot online. When I was parking at the second spot the attendant kept motioning me further and further to the right, until I hit a chainlink fence. But this time I could get out my car.
I walked around the venue to do some anthropology of the line. I saw one of my Twitter mutuals, who I knew was going to be there, but I didn’t say anything to them because it didn’t look like they were having fun waiting in the rain. But maybe that was a weak thing to not do. I wasn’t having fun in the rain either so I went to a vegan restaurant about a mile walk away. I was the only person eating there. On my walk there and my walk back, I could see many of the Chicago apartment living room TVs all pointed to the Kansas vs. Villanova men’s college basketball semifinal game. I had some money riding on the game, needing Kansas to make the finals to clinch second place in my work bracket. I love walking around a city seeing the same sports game on different TVs. It makes me feel like I have so much agency in the world. Kansas won.
I went back to the Metro and waited in line for about an hour before the doors opened. It was only lightly raining now. The kid in front of me in line looked 18 years old and had on a white Drain Gang merch hoodie and never said anything to anyone. The couple behind me in line were talking about the SadBoys subreddit. They had tried to get tickets for the sold-out show off Reddit, and had been scammed multiple times, and they weren’t sure if the tickets they got were real. The line started to get big. In front of me, a large group of kids all around 20 years old were trying to help their friend who was stumbling around, clearly very drunk. He threw up multiple times, all liquid, mixing with the ground wet from the rain. Eventually he and his girlfriend left the line. The people behind me kept telling their story about their tickets, and someone offered them an extra unused ticket he had. Rather than use that ticket for better odds to get into the show, they called one of their friends. She was at work, and she left her shift on the spot to meet them and see Bladee. I don’t know if she or any of them made it in because I kept going forward in line.
Once inside I went straight upstairs to the concert location, not because I cared that much about getting a good spot, I just didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t use the coat check because I tied my coat around my waist. There were a lot of people waiting. There was an opener band, who was playing Drain Gang remix songs and maybe some originals. People weren’t paying a ton of attention to him. People held up their phones with large font messages about needing cigs. People held up their phones with Doodle Jump and Temple Run mobile games to be quirky, like they do at other shows. I had Twitter going on my phone but I didn’t hold it up above my head. Someone was holding up their phone with the end of the Duke vs. UNC men’s basketball semifinal, the second game that night, which ended minutes before the show started. It was harder to register anyone in particular when we were in a crowd than it was when we were in a line. Like Charli XCX talks about, I liked feeling the heat of all the bodies.
I guess this is the concert review part. When they opened with “Western Union” the crowd went insane, ten times the energy that had been there for the opener, and it only gradually subsided. Bladee and Ecco and Thaiboy were all on the stage at once, alternating songs between each other. I thought that it was cute that Bladee let Thaiboy and Ecco have about equal stage time with him even though Bladee has more music and is more famous. I thought it was cute how they appealed to the zoomer instant gratification brain and immediately rolled into the next songs, never taking a second to pause, cutting the long outros that Drain Gang songs often have. I really was unqualified to go to the show. I didn’t know about half of their older music, which they played, and a lot of the famous songs I did know they seemed to intentionally not play. Bladee only did three songs total from 333 and The Fool, and the crowd seemed to not care when he did. I really liked the part in “Who Goes There” when Bladee said “no touching I find it disgusting” in front of the crowd. I really liked the part where the three of them all stood together with their arms around each other while Ecco2k song “Truefriend” played, but I don’t think that song is publicly released anywhere. They only played for an hour and a half but I would drive ten hours to see it again.
I was underqualified for the show, but it immediately made me understand Drain Gang like I had not before. The dignity and the grace with which they navigate the world, that’s the common thread, even through the “evil Bladee” earlier music. It comes to an interesting head in 333 and The Fool and Crest, where Bladee almost takes it to christian morality. But that’s clearly not where he wants it to land. Bladee’s fall 2022 album, Spiderr, pushes a synthesis of the earlier Drain Gang music and his later moral style. He opens Spiderr’s central track “Icarus 3reestyle” with the math equation, “3 + 3 + 3 = 9”, meaning that the trinity trust the plan worldview he evoked in his 2020 and 2021 albums always contained within it the earlier Drain Gang worldview, which he commonly abbreviates in his early albums as “D9”, the nine in the equation. And that wasn’t a surprise for me because at this show I already felt the synthesis. I don’t know what it was about the show that made me instantly get it, but I feel like I always grasp something about a band whenever I see them live for the first time, a crucial missing aspect that becomes real when you see them in the flesh.
When I returned to my car, one of my tires was completely flat. I’m not sure if it was from the first time that I parked badly or the second time that I parked badly but one of them had left a hole that had gradually let out air while I was at the show. I called my mom who was worried. Normally I would have been worried too but because I had just got out of the Drain Gang show I was possessed with confidence in the fate of the world to overcome all obstacles, the feeling all good art gives me. I called someone online to help me put on my spare and he came extremely quickly and I drove home only thirty minutes delayed. I took backroads on the way back, because you’re not supposed to drive more than fifty miles per hour on the spare tire.
On the midwest backroads, through small towns and winter-emptied cornfields, I listened to Drain Gang albums. First I listened to Bladee’s The Fool, then I listened to Drain Gang collab album D&G, then I listened to Ecco2k’s E, then I listened to Drain Gang collab album Trash Island, then I listened to Bladee’s solo album Eversince, then I listened to Ecco and Bladee collab album Crest. This is probably the most Drain Gang I’ll ever listen to consecutively in my life, but again, it was the first time I understood how it all fit together, and it was very magical. I got home twenty-four hours after I had woken up to go on the hike that morning. I didn’t do much at all the next day, but I think it’s okay to live like that, to have some days that mean a lot more than others.