Tag: khemmis
Hell or High Roller: Psycho Las Vegas 2021
Rob Shepyer
August 26, 2021
There was a time when for me, going to Psycho Las Vegas meant budgeting only enough money to eat McDonalds for three days while I slept on a friend’s couch in some lawless Vegas neighborhood so far off the strip, Ubers wouldn’t dare travel to such unsavory corners. Now, in the post-pandemic world, I report on Psycho with new purpose. This year, I was staying in a Delano scenic suite high above the city and budgeted enough money to properly chase the American dream. Raoul Duke’s American dream in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a metaphor for the limits of human consciousness. With freedom as the central American covenant, what greater expression of patriotism is there than breaking free of reality’s chains by dosing yourself past every threshold? Now though, as I take that same trip as Duke in 2021, my search for the American Dream is a futile attempt to connect with a time long gone. You might assume I mean the world before the pandemic but I also mean that beautiful era in music history where rock and metal bands could draw crowds as far as the eye can see. How do we recover
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Live Desolation: Khemmis at the Echoplex
Dillon Vaughn
July 10, 2018
Performing an album in it’s entirety is generally reserved for bands with monumental releases; devoting a night to a single release shows confidence in the structure and integrity of the album as a whole and seemingly elevates the title and importance of the gig from a show to an “event.” Doubling down on the critical success of their previous releases, Khemmis performed their new album Desolation in full recently at the Echoplex for the first night of a very short run of intimate album release shows in LA, Chicago, and Denver. related content: Los Angeles Strikefest At The Regent: By Die-Hards, For Die-Hards Desolation was something I avoided listening to before the show as I wanted my first experience to be in a live setting. I had only seen Khemmis once before – at last year’s Psycho Las Vegas – and while a late afternoon festival set time doesn’t generally lend as well to showcasing a bands strength as a headlining set does, their performance was still something that cemented me as a fan and remains a highlight of the weekend. That being said, the LA event did not disappoint. Beginning the night with a powerful performance of Hunted’s title
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