The great thing about Mark Helbing is that sometimes, when he’s playing guitar, his posture and pose are such that if the guitar were missing, he wouldn’t even look like he was playing air guitar.
There was a lot of two-handed tapping on display; common in math/screamo bands, but certainly a specialty of Mark Helbing (and bassist Markie Glassgow, not pictured)
Jake Bradshaw gets noodle-y. There was a buzz in the crowd as they waited for Panel Van to take the stage — everyone in the band was onstage, ready, and Bradshaw was nowhere to be found. Someone mentioned that he was taking a nap (even though he’d just soundchecked ten minutes prior). Certainly this wasn’t true; but for this reporter, it will always be fun imagining he’d sneaked away into a small corner to catch 8-8.5 minutes of Z’s.
The aggression and intensity mentioned in our previous interview with Panel Van was certainly on display during their set — most of all in Markie Glassgow’s vocals.
The mic took a beating. One must imagine the damage done to lips and teeth on the other end of those transactions.
Several times throughout their set, fans of the band (Enta’s Daniel Lee and Hank.’s Ted Lerch) took to the mic to scream along with Glassgow — one high point of the set was Lerch lerching the mic away from the stage, simultaneously screaming and starting a mosh pit.
Surely it helped his playing go smoothly having eventually put it in a more traditional position, but at the beginning of the set, Helbing was actually offstage altogether with his pedal board — in the kitchen.
Matt Zuckerman (almost pictured).
In addition to tapping, Glassgow heavily used bass chords, which expertly filled out the sound of the band, with Bradshaw and Helbing’s guitars either being quite high-register, or simply so distorted and loud that the low end kept them grounded.
Mark Helbing even sings conversationally.
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Photos courtesy of Celine Broussard.