Just about everyone in the Louisville punk scene packed a bowl on Saturday not like that when local DIY punk festival No Comply 2 played at the David Armstrong Extreme Park.
No Comply 2, a sequel to last year’s No Comply Night, featured a lineup of seven bands: The Histrionics, Zerg Rush, Shitfire, Mr. Clit and the Pink Cigarettes, Thee Tabs, Anemic Royalty, and returning headliner Belushi Speed Ball. (Except for Mr. Clit, all of the bands were from Louisville.) Another local band, Sunshine, also played as the accompaniment to a “death race” for skaters before the main event started. (There was also an “alleycat race” for cyclists beforehand, which the band did not play for.)
Belushi Speed Ball, as ever, delivered an exhilarating, messy, action-packed set this time, themed around the Indiana Jones franchise. (Incidentally, this was also the band’s first public appearance with their new guitarist Jamison Land, a former member of GWAR.) Early on in the set, frontman Vinny Castellano, dressed as the iconic hero, “stole” a golden idol modeled after the band’s manager, Señor Diablo (Beau Kaelin), and ran away with it, parodying the famous scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Shortly after, though, Castellano nearly met his match with a “boulder” a human-sized beach ball.
The party turned even more chaotic when drummer Mr. Clit’s drummer, Ayesha McKee, fired a foam cannon into the bowl from above as part of Belushi’s set. But it didn’t end there Belushi also handed out and/or threw out 20 pounds of colored powder, 100 cans of LaCroix (an homage to their song “We Aren’t Thrashers, We’re Hipster Posers”), 100 “snakes” (pool noodles), 100 fake bugs, and 200 glow sticks plus some whipped cream and (fake) Listerine, too. Before they played their latest hit, “Ripping Off Municipal Waste,” they also brought out a 10-gallon vat of “nuclear waste” orange Jell-O.
(Don’t worry as always, they and their fans helped clean up the mess afterwards.)
Belushi’s set brought plenty of (figurative) heat to the bowl, which, by that point, had swelled to its fullest capacity of the day. Not that the skate park ever lacked any heat, though the temperatures stayed in the 90s for most of No Comply, even into the evening. Festival organizers set up a cooling station with plenty of free water before the day began; after every set, staff reminded guests to stay hydrated.
Despite the challenging temperatures, the turnout was solid and two to three times larger than last year’s, according to an official estimate. Reeves Outen, one of the event organizers and the drummer for the band Sunshine, told LEO that about 700 to 1,000 people showed up over the course of the day.
