By Jase Walker
It’s absolutely Baltic as your average Brit would say, it’s freezing to the point of my thick socks being bloody useless. Good thing I’m spending the evening in a hotbox in North Amsterdam with one of the hottest bands to break out of the ÜK in the past few years though eh? It’s Maruja, and I am here to see them kill it in a venue they’ll be taking a hop, skip and a jump over when they deign to return next year. Bringing KRAM along for the show, a new band to myself but never an unwelcome addition to a show so quite excited to see what they decide to display for tonight’s show!
They kick off with a massive drum crash after a rather quiet walk on which scares the shit out of me but KRAM are now in session. They strike me immediately as quite close to the likes of Arctic Monkeys with that sort of stoner rock meets indie vibe with vocals that carry a certain drawl to them. It’s also striking how young these lads are too, especially considering the quality of their music and performance too, playing like seasoned veterans with experience way beyond their years.
This sort of stuff wouldn’t be out of place blasting from the main stage of Leeds and Reading festival! They sound like they’ve grown up listening to the aforementioned Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs, Futureheads, The Music and possibly The Editors at a push. This is a band that has immersed themselves in some of the best indie of the past decades to come out of the ÜK and mix it all up in a blender and I fucking love it.
They spend a bit of time shouting for the liberation of Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine and the singer, not content with the middling responses from the crowd, decides to get stuck into the middle of them to provoke a bigger reaction. And what a reaction it was, the crowd kneels and follows along before exploding into a massive moshpit, exactly what they were fishing for! A strong message that befits a band with an incredibly strong persona and that’s what KRAM absolutely are: a truly self-assured group that are making an impact big enough to get on board with Maruja, and similarly have left a massive impression on me tonight.
A single light shows a Palestine flag in the background while discordant strings boom over the speakers: it’s time for Maruja and the crowd clearly can’t contain their excitement. I genuinely never thought I’d get the shot at seeing this band in a venue of this size considering the buzz around them but I am very thankful that I’m here!
The crowd immediately opens up, there’s no fucking around here tonight, the crowd wants their pound of flesh and they’re gonna get it! The moment the saxophone kicks in things immediately escalate, genuinely I’ve never seen or heard a band that sounds anything like Maruja. A truly unhinged mix of punk, funk, hip-hop, anything goes into the mix and the end result is an unhinged band that delivers insane energy! It’s already apparent why their live shows are talked up as some of the most raw and energetic gigs you could possibly see right now. It’s bizarre how there’s even elements of post-rock mixed into here too, Maruja are truly an unknown quantity with an incredibly unique sound that is even more engrossing at a live show than the first few puzzled listens to their debut album.
The interaction between an insane crowd and music that provokes such a response weirdly reminds me a ton of my first experience with Fat Dog. Energetic music that’s led by a significant amount of Saxophone as the lead instrument seems to send the crowd into full lizard brain insanity. At parts there’s also super intense moments of psych rock, similar to the likes of GOAT or Glass Beams, Maruja just keeps pulling out bizarre musical influences out of a hat and I couldn’t be more enthralled! The saxophone player looks to be gearing up to get stuck into the crowd as he’s pulling his pickup cable along and sure as hell he gets stuck in there.
The crowd parts like Moses did the Red Sea and suddenly the crowd converges on him and he somehow manages to make it out unscathed and back onto the stage. This is absolute mania, this is unhinged, this is absolutely batshit insane and I fucking love it. Their vocalist dances around the stage like a trained performer, when he’s not aggressively spitting words into the microphone, he’s swaying around and slowly waving his arms around, lost in the sound of his band’s own music.
There’s so many twists and turns to their set that it’s giving me musical whiplash in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen since King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard. It’s like listening to a sermon delivered by an overly spiritual geezer you’d meet in Manchester’s Big Hands after a few too many pints and then getting thrown into the middle of Manchester Punk Fest without a fucking clue how you got there.
Ordinarily I find with a lot of shows I see, I find the time to really observe what the crowd are doing and how they’re responding but I need to emphatically stress that for this show I honestly couldn’t care less. I am so unbelievably drawn into what Maruja are doing on stage that what everyone else is doing literally doesn’t matter. I’m genuinely in awe of how Maruja can get up night after night on a tour of this length and put on a show of this calibre for an hour and a half repeatedly.
This is truly an enigma in its own right, many bands rely on technical productions or somewhat short sets so they can conserve their energy as they push through lengthy tours but Maruja is truly remarkable in that it’s just them smashing through 90 fucking incredible minutes of performance, night after night.
That was more than just a live show, that was a religious experience.
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