Machine Girl - Corner Hotel, Melbourne, Australia - June 23, 2022
Everyone's favourite digital hardcore band came to Australia for the first time immediately after a lengthy and intense European tour (they'd been in the Netherlands on the Sunday before this show, then played in Sydney in Wednesday). They could have been forgiven for any proposed sluggishness, but they sure as hell were not.
The Corner Hotel was sold out and it was a good opportunity for the alt crowd (even with my dyed hair I was one of the more normal people there, and I don't think I've ever been in a room with as many trans people as I was then - I met four different people I knew from Twitter, including one of them randomly in line). We got in shortly before the doors and crowded around the stage for the opening act,
Prophecygirl - a random local DJ who put on a high-intensity set with lots of pitched-up remixes. They kept spinning around on stage to try and get us hyped, and they did a reasonable job, although I think having three remixes of one artist is a bit cheap.
Machine Girl came on twenty minutes after the opener finished, five minutes later than expected. Matt said that it was their second show in Australia, and that "maybe it would be their last". Then the first song started and it all went to shit in the best possible way. Sean was a beast on the drums and was locked in perfectly with the electronic backing tracks; Matt almost barked the vocals and the entire crowd was going nuts. This was my first time in a mosh pit, and it's probably the most intense physical experience of my life - I'm not very big and so I spent the whole time being pinned against everyone around me, trying not to get my hair pulled or fall onto the ground (there was one surprisingly strong and lanky cunt in the opening act who kept pushing people around with his arm out to get what I can only assume were selfies, he seemed to calm down in the main set but it was probably just that everyone was like that).
Halfway through at a break between songs Matt asked us if we knew Sophie, Drain Gang, 100 gecs, etc., and then said that the next song they were going to play was the exact opposite of all of that (it was one of the rare songs in the set that he actually played bass on). A few songs later he climbed off stage and sang for a little while from the bar on my side of the pit, and then I think he moved over to the other side but I had no idea where he was, I couldn't see at all - there may have been an encore, there was at least a three-minute feedback loop to end a song, but I couldn't see him. We kept chanting for one more song, and they did, and since I'd been moved right up to the front I was like a metre away from Matt (there's video on my Twitter). It was awesome...even if I was sore as fuck afterwards.
(Tried taping the show, but I had nowhere safe to put the recorder and it wound up getting knocked out of my shirt onto the floor early. Abandoned it early, the first three songs I put on Dimeadozen the morning after.)