There’s really nothing quite like a sweaty and high-octane garage rock show, especially at 1:15 a.m. in far North Quebec. Iguana Death Cult, a group hailing from Rotterdam in South Holland, clearly brought the heat to their early-morning set. From the moment of the first bluesy riff, frontman Jeroen Reek, who looks like a more approachable Stone Cold Steve Austin, wailed on the microphone, his powerful voice echoey off the Pazzo bar ceiling and walls.
Iguana Death Cult’s music on paper is actually quite simple—some garagey punk riffs here, thundering bass there, batshit drum fills—but it’s in their tenacity and unrelenting vibe where they shine. The band isn’t a band, so much as a fever dream with a chaotic rhythm section—similar to Parquet Courts with a touch of Viagra Boys and The Damned.
Songs from the latest album, Guns Out, consistently bleed into each other after Reek spits a mist of beer into the air. I swear they crashed through about 20 songs in 40 minutes, which is just unheard of. The IDC boys also had some call-and-response from the audience during “I Like It, It’s Nice.”
By the time they tore into “Supreme Leader,” Reek had abandoned any pretense of standing still, his mic stand tilted and clinging for life like a felled tree, while bassist Justin Boer was locked into a groove so filthy it should have come with a “caution” sign. The crowd, sardined and sleep-deprived, didn’t care that it was well past any reasonable hour—they moshed like the sun was never coming up.
After the set, the room was drenched, deafened, and grinning. Pazzo’s ceiling may never fully recover from the echo of Iguana Death Cult, but neither will anyone who was standing under it.
