The Garden Opened a Portal to the Nineties at Chicago’s Riviera Theatre

By: Shawna O’Hara, Editor – Photos by: James Scully

There was a moment during The Garden’s set at Chicago’s Riviera Theatre when the evening stopped resembling a concert and began to feel like an extended scene from The Matrix.

The room was dark and industrial, the stage intermittently illuminated by dusty beams and glowing screens. Wyatt and Fletcher Shears looked as though they’d wandered in from some particularly sinister corner of the late ’90s. At the same time, the music ricocheted between pounding electronic beats, industrial noise and bursts of unmistakably Southern Californian punk. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Fletcher abandoned his drum kit, rolled acrobatically toward the front of the stage and attempted a wonderfully inelegant, Cobain-esque cartwheel before collapsing alongside a microphone stand.

In a flash, he was back behind the kit, pounding away as though nothing had happened.

That moment might be the truest way to explain The Garden: every time you think you’ve figured out what you’re watching, they become something else.

The atmosphere at the Riviera felt like a gathering of people who had agreed upon their own unique dress code. The predominantly young crowd arrived clad in a sea of black leather and lace, with more than a few faces painted in The Garden’s signature clownish style. Before the lights fell, strangers turned to acquaintances, chatting easily throughout the room. A particular sense of community was palpable, not simply an audience there strictly for a band, but a subculture convening for the night.

Ghost Mountain proved an appropriately strange introduction. Performing almost entirely in pitch-black darkness, backlit by shifting screens and deep washes of color, the set conjured something moody, electronic, and vaguely ’80s. At times, the easiest shorthand was admittedly strange: imagine Depeche Mode making rap music. It worked.

Despite the sparse setup, Ghost Mountain produced the atmosphere of a much larger electronic act. The crowd was already fully invested, jumping together in the pit while fans in one of the Riviera’s balcony boxes headbanged above them. Ghost Mountain—born Wren Elliot Kosinski—brought considerable energy that occasionally contrasted with surprisingly mellow passages, but the industrial pulse underneath the performance never disappeared. Banter was scarce beyond enthusiastic, and frequent, cries of “Chicago!” but the set didn’t need much of it. By the time it ended, the room had been properly darkened for what was coming next.

And then the lights went out. The screaming was deafening.

Eerie entrance music filled the Riviera before a spotlight found Fletcher behind the drums, turning The Garden’s arrival into something closer to a theatrical reveal. The screaming only mounted. For a few seconds, the reaction felt less like an underground punk show than footage of The Beatles arriving at Shea Stadium, except these particular objects of hysteria were dressed more like Trent Reznor. Then the drums thundered in.

The Garden tore through an opening run of “Filthy Rabbit Hole,” “AMPM Truck” and “Ugly,” wasting virtually no time between songs. Fletcher attacked the kit with enormous punk fills while Wyatt drove the music forward, producing a sound disproportionately huge for two people. It’s the same peculiar trick that made early Nirvana seem physically larger than a three-piece: there simply shouldn’t be that much noise coming from so few bodies. Genre became increasingly useless for keeping track.

At various points, The Garden sounded like late-’90s Southern California punk, industrial rock, electronic music, emo and pop-punk. Minutes later, the Riviera had transformed into a rave. There were flashes of The Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails, moments that recalled grimy ’90s New York clubs, and others that could have been pulled from Southern California at the turn of the millennium. As songs like “Ballet,” “A 50’s Guy’s Eyes” and “The Mess” arrived in quick succession, none of those comparisons lasted long enough to become an adequate description.

The Garden remained unmistakably The Garden.

Fletcher was particularly difficult to look away from. Blond hair flying and limbs seemingly incapable of remaining still, he attacked the drums with the loose physicality of Taylor Hawkins, punctuating songs with rolls, gymnastics and excursions to the front of the stage. At one point he abruptly became a substantial vocal presence; moments later he was back at the kit, hammering out conventional punk fills with startling force. The theatricality occasionally approached Taking Back Sunday levels of physical chaos, but underneath it was a remarkably disciplined musician.

That contradiction extended to the entire performance. The Garden looked severe and industrial but could sound gleefully Californian. Their show appeared chaotic while progressing like a well-oiled machine. Songs collided with barely enough room for applause, while Wyatt and Fletcher offered remarkably little banter beyond the wonderfully unnecessary introduction, “If you don’t know, we’re The Garden.”

The audience certainly knew, and seemed to know, every syllable that followed.

The Riviera could barely contain the continuous screaming, shouting, and singing from a crowd that responded to the twins with a fervor rarely encountered at an ordinary rock show. When the band announced they were going to “throw a few old ones at ya,” the reaction somehow became louder. By the time “Egg” arrived in the latter half of the set, there was little question of how deeply this audience knew The Garden’s catalog.

Women shrieked from throughout the room. The pit churned. Phones repeatedly shot into the air, capturing hurried fragments destined for Instagram and Snapchat before disappearing again as their owners returned to the show. Security escorted a number of particularly unruly crowd surfers from the room, but even that barely interrupted the momentum.

That devotion is important to understanding The Garden. The weirdness doesn’t merely amuse their fans. They appear completely sincere about it.

And sincerity may be what keeps the whole thing from collapsing beneath its own theatricality. The acrobatics, clown imagery, ominous visuals, electronic interludes, and stylistic whiplash could easily become gimmickry in less capable hands. Instead, they’re wrapped around two musicians who know exactly what they’re doing, and an audience entirely willing to follow wherever they decide to go next.

By the time the night’s final stretch carried through “Flailing on the Tracks,” “Eve of Nothing” and “Chainsaw the Door,” the seemingly incompatible pieces of The Garden’s sound had stopped feeling incompatible at all. An encore of “What Else Could I Be but a Jester” and “Thy Mission” provided one last eruption from a crowd that had seemingly spent the entire night waiting for another reason to erupt.

Walking out of the Riviera, the easiest reaction was also the most honest:

What the hell did I just see?

Whatever it was, nobody else sounds or looks quite like The Garden.