Gov Ball Day 2: The Garden Summons Torrential Rain with Occult Performance
- Brandi Martin
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Within the sea of purple-clad, glitter-dusted Olivia Rodrigo fans who crowded around the Gov Ball entrance Saturday afternoon, a speckling of awaitees donning black, studded Western wear and white-faced clown makeup represented the equally ardent fans of the experimental rock band The Garden. After a day of agitated anticipation and mood-dampening downpours, a wicked cackle poured forth from the speakers of the Grove stage, evoking the greeting of an oversized animatronic at Spirit Halloween (or, for fans of The Garden, the sonic motif that appears in songs like OC93 and Filthy Rabbit Hole). On the screen appeared an imposing photograph of a white-haired old woman in a dilapidated hallway, the walls receding to a distant dimness. The woman looks toward the camera, seemingly caught in conversation. There is nothing explicitly wrong about the photograph, yet it is undeniably eerie, belonging to the sort of decontextualized and uncanny horror that floods the Internet. The photo evokes the creeping sense of intrusion, of having trespassed on a malevolent realm. Our guide into the perverse, punky, irreverent, and above all idiosyncratic world of The Garden was a cryptkeeper-esque voice who, over the mournful song of crickets, told the eerie fairytale of two farmhands who shared a room until one began to feel very tired each morning. His exhaustion was due to a witch turning him into a horse and riding him across the countryside each night. As the second farmhand volunteered to sleep in the cursed bed, he too was turned into a horse, his fate left a mystery as drummer Fletcher Shears appeared to supply a fill onstage and the narrator unnervingly cackled.
The minds behind this unsettling display are twin brothers Wyatt and Fletcher Shears. Wyatt—distinguishable from his identical twin only by his brunette, rather than white-blonde, locks—strode straight to the microphone and declared “I pledge allegiance to whatever I see fit,” signaling Ballet off their most recent Six Desperate Ballads. The song is a far cry from the expectation of horror-packed goth or emo tracks set by the surreal introduction. Rather, the brothers jumped and somersaulted to the thumping, bombastic club beat. In the whiplash between the prowling disquietude of the intro and the punchy eruption of the first track, The Garden performed a sorcerous act: subsuming the agitation of the day and transmuting it into a manic, edgy, ferocious energy, a testament to the creative potential of discomfort. Throughout the show, the twins surrendered their bodies to the supernatural power of the music, Fletcher somersaulting and Wyatt moving jerkily across the stage as though propelled by his bass guitar—as though the instrument were itself possessed. The fans mirrored this musical sacrifice, thrashing around the mosh pit in a cultic offering of raw energy. It was among—if not—the most devoted fan crowd of the weekend: rowdy, boisterous, and actually moshing. Throughout the first few songs, Wyatt repeatedly signaled the sound engineers to bump up the sound, rapidly becoming the loudest set at the small Grove stage, and the easiest to lose oneself in.
The brothers wore identical black suits, with white button-downs and clean lines. With their long hair, the outfits evoked classic emo aesthetics (even without their signature clown makeup), while details like their tiger-striped guitar strap lent a rock n’ roll edge. They presented as dual doppelgangers, light and dark, strange, mischievous, and unknowable—perfect for a band with one of the least categorizable discographies of recent music history. The crowd undulated to the thumping beat of Ballet, jumping up and down as the brothers growled, “Roll with the punch or limp away” and performed their own delicate ballet across the stage as their mic cords trailed and tangled behind. Their rapid-fire lyrics were slurred, as though time moves too slowly. Wyatt and Fletcher donned their instruments for the next track, the crowd-favorite Horseshit on Route 66, the eponymous song off their 2024 album. The stage lights strobed furiously as the crowd opened into a swirling, gyrating mass of moshing bodies. Wyatt spat out, “nasty motherfucker,” followed by a guttural, throaty grunt into the microphone that the crowd welcomed with cheers. As Wyatt grunted, groaned, and mumbled, each lyric was punctuated with ire. The instruments remained for AMPM Truck, Wyatt stalking around the stage as he repeated the song’s distinct energetic guitar lick; the crowd bounced up and down to the song’s unnerving narrative of a near-fatal car crash.
The instruments were again discarded for the cyber-hardcore What Else Could I Be But a Jester, a tour through a technodystopia in which Fletcher is our punk-rap tour guide. The brothers shared vocal duties on this track, Wyatt plaintively screaming “What else could I be?” as Fletcher lifted his mic stand and spun around like a helicopter propeller. As the first refrain of the chorus concluded with “Ran straight into a—,” Fletcher plummeted into a somersault from which he quickly arose and oscillated his microphone cord like a battle rope. Those who have never before listened to The Garden will not know where the music is going to take them at any given time; it is truly experimental, dynamic, and enigmatic. By the same token, those watching The Garden perform never know what the band will do next on stage, using performance to amplify their uncanny creations and Devil-may-care edge. During the chorus, the brothers alternated words and phrases, joining together for words like “ribcage” in a sort of cultic elementary chant. With the song’s conclusion, Wyatt drawled “Straight into a pole…stuck in the middle of a nightmare,” signaling the ghoulish synthesizers and rapid drum machine of The Nightmare. As Fletcher swung his microphone around like a high-powered lasso and launched into another signature somersault, Wyatt grasped the microphone stand, preparing to deliver the grim lyrics in his possessed monotone. Fletcher interjected to declare, “It’s a nightmare,” corroborated by his guttural scream before he hurled himself off the drum platform. The brothers then tore through the heavy, grinding, hardcore punk OC93.
As the ominous gray clouds of the evening hovered around the Grove stage, the elderly woman still loomed over the audience from the stage screen, as if supernatural forces were conspiring to entrap us in her domain. The brothers once again took up their instruments, and as the maniacal laughs of the Haunted House on Zillow intro rang out like a gong, the clouds unleashed an onslaught of swollen raindrops, causing many crowd members to run for cover as the holdouts thrashed in the fresh mud. The intrusive gray clouds seemed a sinister extension of the fog emanating from the corners of the stage, blown into a fury by the gusting winds. When the brief, devilish song came to an end, Wyatt thanked the now-drenched crowd for sticking around. Seemingly as a reward, the clear and bright guitar line of the standout Chainsaw the Door played, and several escapees bolted back into the downpour, dancing in the rain as though they had intended to conjure it all along. The crowd splattered mud across their legs as they spun, flailed, and kicked, the eccentric dance party continuing into the sparkling, theatrical, and iconoclastic pop song This Could Build Us a Home.
Afterward, Wyatt addressed the crowd for the first time to warn, “We got one more, we’re gonna do it quick.” Perhaps the brothers prefer to let the music speak, or prefer to be shrouded in mystery, or simply the truncated schedule of the day, which made time more precious, in turn made the brothers more reticent to use it on any non-musical vocals. For their final frenetic performance, Wyatt laid down his bass guitar, and the twins performed their hit single with Mac DeMarco, Thy Mission. The energetic indie rock track produced a strong reaction, an uproarious cheer rumbling through the crowd like thunder. Wyatt repeated the opening word of the song, “scum,” like a cultic chant, bellowing into the microphone. Before the final refrain of the chorus, Wyatt writhed, kicked, and punched across the stage as though halfheartedly warding off some unassailable demons, while Fletcher pounded his drum kit and forcibly flipped his hair. The frantic, screeching near-gibberish speech which brings the song to its close ended just as abruptly live, Wyatt’s throaty scream swiftly cut off by “Thank you very much! Have a great night, don’t get wet.” Fletcher gave the drums a final thrashing as Wyatt bent at the waist to bow, and the twins nonchalantly departed, leaving us with lingering wisps of fog, a low howling emanating from the sound machine, and the old woman staring vacantly out at us.
Brandi Martin
Dutch Doscher