Pianu-Metal straddles being a tour of the Nu-Metal sub-genre of Rock for enthusiasts and an introduction for everyone else. We can enjoy the show, but it doesn’t convincingly sell the music as worth preserving, nor, as in a Linkin Park song, argue “In the end, it doesn’t even matter”.
Our solo performer, proudly non-binary Piano Punk, is a classically trained pianist. They have a dedication to Nu-Metal (despite its noted status as “rock’s most dismissed genre” in the show blurb) that goes back to its late-1990s emergence in their teen years.
Punk has the knowledge and skills to deliver on the promised highlighting of “melodies beneath the distortion”. That’s a nice hook for those Midsumma-guide readers with only vague memories of noisy energy (say, of Korn or Limp Bizkit), who wondered why some groups were so successful.
Also, Punk, having the benefit of further life experience since those teen years, has realised that it’s appropriate to scrutinise their early devotion by revisiting some of the movement’s important bands. Well, maybe “catalogue” is a more accurate description at times.
The show started off with fan service as Punk took to the stage with various chains connecting different parts of their clothing. This earned the laughter of recognition from some, and left us n00bs guessing that this was some fashion we’d ignored or forgotten.
In the opening song to follow, the volume of Punk’s electric keyboard could overwhelm their singing, kneecapping (what I guess might have been) their framing of the show. It’s possible that a better mix would have prevented us from having to infer the performer’s intentions.
It’s also possible that the work wasn’t intending to be an academic lecture, more a series of impressions, much like Punk’s (insightful) categorisation of many Nu-Metal songs. This gave the uninitiated various entry points into the different chapters of the tale Punk wanted to tell.
It was also good (and rare!) to have sound issues fixed relatively quickly, permitting us to enjoy how Punk’s combination of playing and vocal delivery could imbue tunes with brooding or menace.
There was some evidence for reading the show as collection of scenes relating to Punk’s fandom. Some of their recollections were quite niche, such as on the time needed to download Anime mash-ups sound-tracked by Nu-Metal back in the dial-up-modem days. (If you weren’t there kids, you got a max of 56 kilobytes per second!)
Belatedly Punk’s offerings would go beyond nostalgia. We looked more deeply at features of the scene, such as the misogyny of lyrics, complemented well by lighting effects. There was also an interesting discussion of how the “Madonna-Whore” dichotomy was applied to some female musicians.
The evolution of this system, which labelled Amy Lee (even a casual viewer would remember the drama of some Evanescence film-clips) as a “Near Nordic Maiden” sounded like a complement (the Vikings were awesome!), so I must have missed the meaning here.
Notable historical details included how the all-female band Kitty burst from obscurity to prominence against the odds, and how some disadvantaged demographics prospered in the Nu-metal sphere. So, it wasn’t a bad scene for everyone?
Do such virtues rehabilitate Nu-metal, or do its flaws make it irredeemably problematic? We need more information to answer that. It’s worth remembering that many of us only heard of the “Me Too” mass movement when it went viral in 2017, highlighting widespread misogyny.
But what was happening in the pre-Me-Too world? This show doesn’t argue whether the Nu-metal scene was any different from (or just as bad as) the rest of contemporary pop culture. So we can’t resolve the show’s central question on whether its ok to look back on Nu-metal fondly, or decide it deserves to quietly disappear.
Whilst we might not get that sharp insight, we do get a well-performed, often-amusing show. One of Punk’s funniest observations, employing lyrics from Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle), suggested that Limp Bizkit could be read as having a very progressive view of gender. So maybe there are some bits of the era worth keeping after all. Even as life can be messy, sometimes it can be “peachy”.
Pianu-Metal
Meat Market (The Stables), 2 Wreckyn Street, North Melbourne
Performance: Friday 30 January 2026
Information: www.midsumma.org.au
Image: Pianu-Metal – photo by Act Four Photography
Review: Jason Whyte