Review & Photography by Nathan Vestal for MPM
Puscifer at The Sylvee on Tuesday night was not a casual stop-in, not a “let’s see what this is about” evening, not a background soundtrack for overpriced tallboys and loose Tuesday ambition.
The room had that charged, pre-ritual hum before the lights went down, the kind of electricity that says the congregation knows the scripture but still expects to be surprised by the sermon.
And Puscifer, being Puscifer, did not simply play a concert.
They staged a strange little transmission from the edge of the American subconscious: part rock show, part absurdist theater, part noir séance, part workplace safety video from a company that should absolutely be investigated by federal authorities.
Before the machine fully started grinding, Dave Hill came out to do what Dave Hill does best: bend the air in the room sideways. Hill is a solo act in the truest and strangest sense, combining stand-up, music, storytelling, and absurdist theater into something that feels part comedy set, part rock recital, part deranged motivational seminar. He does not simply tell jokes. He performs a whole cracked universe, one deadpan aside and guitar flourish at a time.
Hill is the rare opener who does not try to win over an audience by pretending to be adjacent to the headliner. He simply walks into the spotlight with his own warped frequency, carrying the confidence of a man who has either planned the whole thing meticulously or just escaped from a very entertaining accident.
His set worked because he understood the assignment without looking like he had read it. He was funny, loose, dry as old bone, and just off-center enough to make the room lean forward. A deliberate looseness ran through him, a kind of controlled unraveling. He did not so much warm up the crowd as loosen the bolts on the evening.
By the time Puscifer arrived, The Sylvee felt primed for something less like a concert and more like an operation.
The band hit with that familiar Puscifer precision: heavy but not blunt, theatrical but not bloated, strange but never sloppy. This is not a band that spills onto the stage. They assemble. Every piece has a purpose. Every shadow seems placed there by someone with a clipboard and a vendetta.
The setlist, in shape and spirit, belonged firmly to the Normal Isn’t era, pulling the crowd into the band’s newest transmission rather than treating the night like a greatest-hits autopsy. Songs like “Thrust”, “Self Evident”, “Bad Wolf”, “Normal Isn’t”, “The Algorithm”, and “Pendulum” gave the first stretch of the show a sleek, paranoid momentum, all chrome nerves and pressure-valve tension. It was Puscifer at its most controlled and uncanny, the music moving like machinery that had somehow developed a moral problem.
The deeper cuts gave the night its serrated edge. “The Quiet Parts” had that signature Puscifer smirk, all coiled groove and sideways menace. “Bullet Train to Iowa” moved with strange, cinematic propulsion, less a song than a runaway signal with headlights.
Maynard James Keenan remains one of rock’s great anti-frontmen, a performer who understands that sometimes the most commanding thing you can do is refuse the obvious spotlight. He does not chase the audience. He lets the audience come to him. That has always been part of the tension in Puscifer: the music can feel deeply human, even vulnerable, while the presentation keeps slipping into surveillance footage, corporate satire, ritualized weirdness, and deadpan nonsense.
That tension is the engine.
Carina Round, meanwhile, was a force of gravity all her own. Her voice did not merely complement Maynard’s; it cut through the room with a different kind of blade. Where Maynard often sounds like he is delivering a warning from behind smoked glass, Round brings flame, muscle, and a dangerous elegance. Together, they create that unmistakable Puscifer chemistry: two voices orbiting the same doomed satellite, occasionally colliding, always pulling the songs into deeper weather.
Round is not window dressing in this machine. She is one of its primary weapons. When her vocals rose through the mix, they did not soften the edges. They sharpened them. She gave the songs lift without making them lighter, drama without melodrama, soul without dulling the weirdness. In a band this visually and conceptually loaded, it would be easy for a vocalist to get swallowed by the theater. Round’s cut through it like a flare in a black sky.
Mat Mitchell, as always, served as the architect behind much of the evening’s controlled burn. His guitar work was not about bloated heroics or center-stage peacocking. It was texture, pressure, and voltage. Mitchell knows when to slash, when to simmer, when to let a riff stalk the room instead of pouncing too soon. His playing gave the songs their skeletal structure and their nervous system, the sleek industrial spine beneath all that surreal pageantry.
Josh Moreau’s bass gave the whole operation its low-end muscle. He did not just hold down the bottom. He prowled through it. In Puscifer, the bass has to do more than thump; it has to move like a threat with rhythm. Moreau locked into the grooves with a kind of understated menace, keeping the songs grounded while everything else flickered between satire, sermon, and fever dream.
And Gunnar Olsen on drums was the engine room, the pulse, the disciplined violence under the hood. His playing had that clean, muscular snap that Puscifer needs live. Too loose and the machine comes apart. Too rigid and the thing loses its human twitch. Olsen found the seam between precision and blood flow, pushing the songs forward without turning them into blunt objects. He gave the night its heartbeat, and when the band leaned into the heavier moments, he made the floor feel like it had hydraulics.
The set moved with the confidence of a band that knows exactly how weird it is and has zero interest in smoothing out the strange parts. The grooves were thick, the arrangements sleek and menacing, the whole thing pulsing with the feel of some forbidden laboratory where the test subjects have learned to dance.
Then came “The Remedy”.
Already one of Puscifer’s great venomous little anthems, the song landed with the proper bite. It is part warning label, part slap across the mouth, part self-help seminar for people who have completely run out of patience, and part anthem for anyone who has ever wanted to hand-deliver consequences with a receipt attached. The crowd ate it up, shouting back with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for revenge fantasies and bar-closing bad decisions.
And then, during the pause, Dave Hill returned.
On a bike.
Doing “stunts.”
The word “stunts” deserves quotation marks here because what happened was less X Games and more beautifully deranged community theater. Hill rolled into the moment like he had been summoned by a cursed bell, turning the pause into a miniature circus of low-stakes athletic triumph. Pushups happened. Bicycle business happened. The unmistakable sense that everyone onstage knew exactly how stupid and perfect it was also happened.
That is the thing about Puscifer’s humor: it does not undercut the music. It sharpens it. The absurdity makes the menace stranger. The comedy makes the machine feel more human. One minute you are locked into a sleek industrial groove, the next a grown man is doing pushups during “The Remedy”, and somehow it all belongs to the same haunted ecosystem.
The show never lost its grip after that. If anything, the interruption only made the room more devoted. Puscifer thrives in that unstable zone between discipline and derailment. The band can lock into a groove with surgical focus, then let some weird little gremlin of chaos crawl across the stage without breaking character.
As the night moved toward its final stretch, the songs opened wider. “The Humbling River” brought a different kind of weight, less bite and more ache, a reminder that beneath all the costuming, concepts, and comic absurdity, Puscifer can still hit the chest with unsettling grace.
By the end of the night, as the music began to fade and the band moved toward the exit, Dave Hill made one more appearance, this time playing them off the stage like some lounge-lizard ferryman guiding souls across the river of encore etiquette. It was ridiculous in the best possible way.
Then came the final little wrinkle: Hill and drummer Gunnar Olsen getting tangled in a bit of onstage hijinx as the night dissolved into comic static. It had the feel of a sketch that had wandered into a rock show and found better lighting. Eventually, a stagehand stepped in and escorted Hill off, restoring order with the weary efficiency of someone who had seen enough.
That ending fits the night perfectly.
Puscifer is often described in pieces: Maynard’s side project, art-rock experiment, electro-industrial cabaret, whatever label gets slapped onto it by people trying to trap smoke in a jar. But live, the project makes more sense as a complete organism. It is not just the songs. It is the timing. The costumes. The deadpan. The menace. The beauty. The dumb joke placed exactly where a dumb joke should not work and therefore works even harder.
At The Sylvee, Puscifer delivered a show that was sharp, strange, funny, heavy, and deeply alive. Dave Hill’s appearances did not feel like distractions. They felt like trapdoors. The kind that open beneath your feet just when you think you understand the architecture.
By the time the lights came up, Madison had been treated to something more satisfying than a standard rock show. It was a transmission, a sermon, a prank, a purge, and a machine with a clown hiding in the gears.
Exactly as it should be.
