Trier

Trier – This will come to be known as the show where we get our first eyewitness encounter with the phenomenon known as crabcore. We will never be the same….

This is also notable as the town where Corey would get sick….Again. This time we’re guessing from, in a total Homer Simpson moment, eating a stray piece of ham that was in a tabouleh salad that he bought at a gas station.

The show itself was at a huge building that was built by Napoleon and is now a complex that does all sorts of community functions. It is part youth facility, part performance space, part music venue….It also houses the bands that play there. It’s the sort of thing that would never fly in the United States.

The first band, City Light Thief plays and is good.

Then comes the second band crabfest…..A band who’s name we won’t mention, goes on and does the full techno, autotune, DJ, “crouching emo/hidden metal” thing that crabcore is all about. Plus, the dudes are in their 30s! At one point the bass player was pretty close to doing the splits. Corey stands there for a full 15 minutes in complete horror. Mark doesn’t make it more than a minute. However, people seemed very into them. They take about 30 minutes to get their gear off stage (which the storage area is about 5 paces from where they played), and then they immediately leave. Thanks dudes!

I think there needs to be a word for something that's so simultaneously awful and awesome at the same time, like a brutal car wreck... or that band.

We play and it’s not so good. I think our minds were just melted from the crabulous rockin’ that preceded us. Whatever, we had a bad show. It happens.

The first band helps us load out without us even having to ask which totally rules. That’s rare over in Europe, even when the other band uses your gear.

Corey wakes up the next morning completely unable to keep food down. Damn. You know, he thought if he got food illness in Europe it would be from some mystery meat sandwich in Italy or horse brains or something. Haggis? Fine. Oysters? A-Ok. Random sausage stand on the street? Perfect! But tabouleh? Really? Lessons learned: Stay away from airplane and gas station food, period.