Puscifer pulls Nashville into ‘Normal Isn’t’ alt reality

More often than not, when a famous musician starts a side project band, it’s often seen as a watered-down version of the group that gained them fame. Usually diehard fans latch onto the project out of some form of loyalty, but it never quite hits as profoundly as the original. In the case of Maynard James Keenan, he’s overcome this stereotype with not one, but two side projects — A Perfect Circle and Puscifer! Last week, for the first time, I had the pleasure of finally seeing Puscifer in all its strange and unusual glory at Nashville’s latest large venue, The Pinnacle. I’m going to be honest with you, I walked into this show not totally sure what to expect.

I walked out feeling like my brain had been wrung out like a wet towel. In the best possible way.

The show kicked off with comedy musician Dave Hall. In my opinion, he is Carrot Top with a guitar: telling jokes and using his guitar as a prop, along with a bicycle. A strange opener usually indicates the headliner is about to melt your mind like hot wax. And melt they did.

Before a single note of Puscifer’s set even hit, two cartoon heads popped up onscreen — Maynard with Carina Round — staring the audience down and telling everyone to put their phones away. Not asking. Telling. And honestly? We did it. You just do it, because you don’t want to be that person in the room when Maynard Keenan has made his feelings about your iPhone abundantly clear. This is a thing with him; he’s been vocal about it for years. At this show, it came through as this comic-book-style bit where they kept demanding the crowd to repeat “I understand” over and over. And the crowd did it. Every time. Which, in retrospect, was kind of the whole point of the night: how easy it is to get a room full of people to just go along with something.

They then opened with “Thrust” and I immediately felt it in my chest.

As a photographer, I truly felt close to greatness. Maynard has talked about what that song is about, essentially begging for the trance of a live show to pull him away from his phone, from the endless screaming hellscape of being online. The song literally starts with “ignore all the voices”; standing in a room where everyone had just surrendered their devices, that line hits different. Puscifer rolled right into “Self Evident” after that, which is exactly what it sounds like: a song about someone being so spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong that it shouldn’t even need to be pointed out. And yet, here we are. Pointing it out. Loudly. The one-two punch of those two songs basically announced: this is what tonight is about!

They pulled several tracks from the new album, Normal Isn’t, which came out February 6th — their first studio record in nearly six years. I was a little curious how their new material would land in a live setting, whether it would feel like filler between the hits. It didn’t. Not even a little bit. It slotted in brilliantly because the band isn’t interested in just playing a greatest hits show for nostalgia purposes — they’re still building something. Still going somewhere weird and interesting.

And then “The Humbling River” happened… and I kind of lost it a little.

It didn’t sound exactly like the album version… the arrangement was different in a way that I can’t fully describe, but it was better somehow. More raw. More present. That song already destroys me on a good day and, hearing it live with whatever they did to it that night, it just landed like a gut punch wrapped in something beautiful. The whole ‘strength through vulnerability’ thing that the song is about? You felt it in the room.

Musically, Puscifer is not messing around. Mat Mitchell alone, I mean… The whole band is just elite-level players who make everything sound controlled and intentional, not stiff. There’s still room for the compositions to breathe. And Carina Round. She’s got this whole aesthetic going on that I can only describe as Blade Runner meets YSL and Alexander McQueen — and it completely works. She’s magnetic in a way that’s hard to explain… like you can’t not watch her when she’s onstage. Vocally, she’s commanding as hell; she and Maynard together are this really interesting balance of heavy and funny meets intense and absurd. One minute, you’re feeling something deep; the next, you’re laughing at something completely bizarre and, somehow, it all makes sense within the Puscifer sphere.

In my opinion, you don’t go to a Puscifer show, you go into one. And when it’s over, you sort of have to stand there for a second and figure out how to get back to regular life. I don’t totally know what I just witnessed. But I’m still thinking about it.

Photography by Derek Jones

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