Ceremony played Cuisine en Locale – 6/28

Ah June. A strange month of music-going. In-between steady shooting gigs and in the midst of moving, I managed to catch a strange combination of newspaper assignments and last-minute shows which covered everything from Rush to Richard Thompson and Refused before concluding at a sweaty Ceremony show at Somerville’s Cuisine en Locale. I left the concluding set of Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival in Western Mass early in order to drive straight back to Boston and make this show, fortuitously aided by a fire alarm that pushed the set times back a good 45 minutes. Michigan’s Pity Sex opened with an agreeable set of shoegaze-y noise-pop before Ceremony utterly decimated the place. Somehow striking a coherent balance between the teeth-baring hardcore of their early records and the ghostly post-punk of May’s The L Shaped Man, the Rohnert Park, CA crew moved deftly between tensely coiled new songs and old ones that started the kind of mosh pits that make you genuinely fear for your safety. Try not to feel at least a slight surge of terror-fueled adrenaline when a swarm of people nearly knocks over a very tall and very heavy P.A. stack you happened to be shooting in the shadows of. Photos of all the glorious chaos below.