With the many splendid flavours of emo, we see the mix with goth and metal share its stage. Ohio may be for lovers, but the mosh demands bodies feed its hunger.
There’s a side lot just past The Manchester Hotel. A scruffy, blotchy bearded man stands next to it with torn off cardboard. Barely legible, “$20 event parking” scrawled in shaky marker. Around the corner of the Music Hall, an auto shop sells off its grounds for $20 a slot. At least, we’re all assuming the man standing with a traffic wand owns the business. Pay the person wearing a safety vest next to the A-sign with “Event Parking $20” and walk over. Who even is Jacob Turner? Either way, a better deal than the muddy slosh patch across the Manchester Music Hall for $25 to shave 30 seconds.
It’s difficult to see through all the vape clouds and popcorn lung if Creeper are wearing fangs, or it’s tricks of the mind from the blood smeared on their chins. Launching into “Mistress of Death”, the beckoning claw opens up the pits. We’re standing at the edge looking into the hellmouth and the soundtrack is pumping fists of blood, eyes pooling with souls leaking out.
As the lead singer of Creeper points into the crowd, a gauntlet expands from the middle. The room breathes out as the floor opens. The circle pants harder and harder as elbows pick up and those inside start jockeying about. One person quickly finds their back to the floor as the roaming torsos throw themselves against the walls. Bodies in the pinball machine and the only blood is fake. “Headstones” lead us back from the belly of the underground. The gothic odyssey nears the light and our aortic vessels ease like the grip of the Sankara stones dropping into the abyss.
From the shadows with a loose jumper, the lead for letlive hits the full bar of energy and arcs back beads of sweat, spit, and water by the second song. The jumper doesn’t last long as we then tear through a singlet right into the bare upper torso. A galvanised rubbish can appears. For a few brief seconds it takes a stomp on the flat, a buckled side, and sits atop Jason Aalon Butler’s head before it rolls off, dejected, to the side. Mics are slaughtered, each one taken to the extremes of the primal scream and summarily drowned in voracious expulsions of spittle. Toward the end of the set, a water bottle is thrown about to create a slip and slide across the stage. Each beat is a pulse away from smashing everything on stage. The only pause to take a breath is between songs to ruminate and parade a flag.
Then, as the set nears its end, Butler is in the throng. A roadie on stage frantically waves fingers across his own neck and shakes the mic cord to signal it running out. “Oh, is that what that sign means?“ Butler asks before teasing out a few more metres to reach the far end of the hall. Now up on a table to pick a guitar off the wall to wail on. Back and through the crowd before letlive say thanks and goodbye.
The crowd shuffles a little. The lights brighten up a fraction for the lull. Up in the rafters, stuck on the string lights, Butler’s torn singlet, dripping with sweat. The minutes drag on with the sound check.
The screamo is in the room 20 years after If Only You Were Lonely, but the sound is distant. You can see the veins popping but the volume is in another room. Respecting each other’s spot, the band is right where you expect them to be. Their cadence and emotion ever present, though hobbled by a contrast gleaming from the groups before. Someone keeps shouting out for Hawthorne Heights to play “Freebird” and doesn’t know when to quit. The kick is still in on “Saying Sorry” with a few bops.
Flailing limbs in the throng are ever present while Hawthorne Heights stand on stage. These crowd surfers barely make it past the first few sets of hands, some do, but many are back down before. And before a few almost tilt too far back where bent necks and wheelchairs will be. They at least have a chance, compared to the earlier sets where the chaotic energy threw shoulders more than float bodies.
The cut for the encore is short, no agonising coy theatrics. It looks like they’ve come back out in different outfits. So we’re in act two to play off the night. The calibration is off on the screen panels so you wouldn’t be able to scan the QR code pointing to “Like a Cardinal” debuting at the end of the set. It hits, and it’s a wave of reserved energy to send the crowd out into the rainy night.
Wafting in the vapid vape clouds with a hint of the hash on 5 March 2026 at the Manchester Music Hall in Lexington, Kentucky. Where you could not guess from the outside who was playing because there were no banners or signage.
Reviewed on Sunday, 22 March 2026