Photo by CLAYTON RUSSELL
It was a creepy, bone-chilling Halloween at the Electric Factory and just about everyone came dressed for the occasion — a cross-generational array of costumes that spanned The Fonz from Happy Days to Finn from Adventure Time. With high fives and good vibes being thrown all around the venue you could tell that everyone was ready for there to party and party hard. So hard an ambulance was on standby outside of the Electric Factory for when it gets crazy.
With most EDM shows you go to there’s a person or two behind a DJ booth and you never get to see any of the action of them making the music. All you usually see is someone staring down a computer screen, twisting a few knobs and the obligatory triumphant raising of hands. But Glitch Mob is a different story. Their instruments looked like controls to a spaceship and tilted towards the crowd to showcase their knob-twiddling skills. Along with the consoles, all three members of the mob had a set of tom-toms for drum circling to their own beats.
Bassy gusts of electronic wind blasted out of the speakers to mark the arrival of the Mobsters, each hooded and mirror-masked as they creepy-crawled out on stage and stood there for more than a minute as the crowd lit up with excitement. Seconds later they tore their masks off and started tapping their space station control boards, triggering futuristic sounds that instilled a bubbling bliss in the crowd. They opened the show with their hit “Drive It Like You Stole It” off of their debut album making a familiar crowd go crazy. With one or two people at a time banging on their drums while the other plays on their “sound machine” it was as though we were all watching an intense studio session.
They played off of each other all night making it seem as though they were making songs up as they went along. In fact, they were playing songs off the much buzzed about Love Death Immortality, released earlier this year. The heavy, throbbing bass intro to “Can’t Kill Us” had even the most nonplussed in the crowd throwing their hands in the air as we all waited for the beat to drop. They didn’t only play their own songs, having the crowd at its hypest when playing an awesome electronic rendition of “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Two hours later, when it was all over, it was clear that Glitch Mob had turned Electric Factory into a Halloween party no one will soon forget. — CLAYTON RUSSELL