Maybe you’re better with words than I am. On Friday, October 8, 2004 the Felix Sarco Band played the junior
ballroom of Scranton Cultural Center. The following day someone said to me, "What was the band like?" I
couldn’t describe what they are, but I could sure tell you what they are not. They’re not like anything like
I ever saw or heard. These guys are original like candy is sweet.
The performance was like watching a living-breathing creature being formed. Sarco completely fills the eyes
and ears. They rewire your circuits to bypass the brain to let the primal beast inside take command. The
music was a drug. Abandoning all self-control, front man
Cromley Legussa prances, dances and minces with the unstoppable power of a loaded freight train doing 70. He navigates the
stage with some inhuman bat sonar that stops him half a hair from destruction. You are in the presence of
something savage and untamed. Civilization stopped at the front door.
The sound is as dense as white noise. It has the intensity of a peyote ritual that precedes the end of the world.
Cromley paints his voice with echo and phase shifters to the point where it’s an unpredictable electronic
instrument with a key for every note and emotion in history. He looks so
glam rock for the first four
minutes with his red prom dress and pink dayglow wig. Minute five and it’s just him and his boxers. Is he a
transvestite, a nudist, or a space traveler who parked his flying saucer outside with the motor running?
It is not necessary to understand English to get
everything he sings. It’s not necessary to understand any language.
The band snarls and growls and on a whim drags the crowd into a frenzy. Like a marionette master
Cromley pulled the crowd’s strings from a sultry sway-in-the-breeze to a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy.
Just when you think you are spent, they hit you with another wave of power and off you go.
In any other band this keyboard player, C.C. Pyschotica, would be the center of attention, but in
this band it’s like a force five hurricane behind the synthesizer competing with a Krakatao eruption at
center stage. Sensory overload is the order of the day. If you are anything like me, you will leave the show
wet, throbbing and at once spent and completely recharged. And possibly with some well-earned
deafness. This is music deconstructed and reassembled just one inch this side of madness. They dare to be
different and revel in it.
-Larry Yori, The Outlook, November 2004 |

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