Honestly, I wasn’t expecting all the moshing and crowd surfing. I’d hopped in a cab seconds after seeing Wild Beasts for a third time in one week and headed to Market Hotel to see Seattle’s finest purveyors of bent surf garage. On record, The Intelligence are genuinely weird, like they try and make normal music and this is what comes out. It’s not dissimilar to what Sic Alps or Thee Oh Sees do, but there’s a sinister edge, kind of like in a David Lynch movie. Slightly uncomfortable. But live, Lars Finberg and the rest of The Intelligence are here to rock. Market Hotel didn’t seem that crowded to me, but when the second song kicked in it was a like a mosh magnet, everyone who was still there rushed towards the stage and collectively lost their shit. In particular, Golden Triangle’s OJ (the band had just played) was a crowd surfing dynamo, despite there not being quite enough crowd to hold him. No matter how many times he got dropped, OJ kept getting back up there. "Let’s see how many people get hurt on this one," a perplexed Finberg joked during the encore. The guy might have bruises all over his body now, but Friday night that little dude was all smiles.

Finberg kept asking the crowd if we could he his vocals — we could I thought they sounded great — but judging by that I don’t think they could hear anything. Sometimes you just move forward via instinct and muscle memory.