Where does Trent Reznor reserve a VIP table at midnight on Friday the 13th? At the Crystal Castles show, right next to a gang of short-haired Hollyweirdos drinking Red Bull from a carafe. A train full of rattling coins careening around a downward spiral begins to capture the bubonic counterpoint between Ethan Kath’s hard candy flipping synthesizer and Alice Glass’s vowel crunching. Alice repeatedly thrashed her body against the crowd’s groping hands. She seemed to triple in length over their heads, through-the-looking-glass warping before our eyes. Between cackling nightmares and heavy breath, she threw in a lot of eerie indecipherable whispering, her vocals twisted into the music more as a sound effect, hitting notes the way a beatboxer evokes instrumentation—except instead of babomp-babomp, the sounds she made were more high-hat broom scratch on a witch’s cauldron. At one point she commanded full syllables (“The night is our hero!”) while writhing in sweat (it also sounded like “We love Guitar Hero!” but that seems an unlikely translation). Throughout the set, a perky Ethan bounced in place, bombarding atoms with ions, a cheerful glow around his hoodied shoulders, ‘this-close’ to smiling. On top of the strange whispery incantations and electronic cyclotron, a live drummer put a little spank on the Castle walls.

— Daiana Feuer