By this point, I've seen the Brendan Yates speaker-stack leap so many times, from so many angles. In the middle of Turnstile's giant free Saturday-afternoon show on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Yates climbed up on a speaker stack that put him maybe seven or eight feet above the stage. As the band launched into "Sunshower," one of the more directly old-school hardcore ragers from last year's Never Enough, Yates launched himself off, curling himself into cannonball position and keeping that form until the split-second before he landed.
It looked cool as hell in the moment, and it looked even cooler when captured as a still photograph. When he's in the air, frozen forever before that sea of people, Yates looks like he's about to soar through the sky like Neo at the end of The Matrix. To anyone who has seen a Turnstile show, Yates' big jump was not a surprise.
He does stuff like that all the time. All five Turnstile members are athletes. I've seen drummer Daniel Fang bust out the resistance bands while winding down after a set.
Yates doesn't say much between songs, but Turnstile sets are marathons of physical expression. He never stops running, jumping, whirling. It's powerful spectacle, and it sweeps you up.
You see what they do, and you want to be a part of it. Eight years ago, at a church hall less that three miles away from the Washington Monument, I saw Yates pull off the most impressive stagedive I have ever seen in my life, a front-flip during the first song of their set at the Time & Space record-release show. The rotation, the hang-time — it was astonishing.
Yates couldn't do anything like that on Saturday. The days of no-barricade Turnstile shows are over. They're just too big for that now.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
