Grote Geelstaart are on the rise

In popular fiction and myth, the sea is a common backdrop for spiralling madness. It’s where Ahab chases his elusive white whale, where giant radioactive lizards from Japan rise up, and where the most unsinkable ship can still go down. Okay, okay, maybe the last one isn’t made up. But when it comes to Mother Oceania, the lines between fiction and reality tend to blur more easily than most. From an evolutionary standpoint, I suppose, it is stranger than fiction that a fish flopping ashore would evolve millions of years into bipedal creatures that would invent things like cotton candy, opera, and the Dutch Delta Works, the intricate network of dykes, barriers, and levees keeping the agitated North Sea at bay.This miracle of human science is trying to stave off unrelenting natural force for as long as humanly possible – despair and defiance squaring up an inevitable doom. A skirmish worthy of blockbuster pay-per-view TV or folk songs passed down through generations. Grote Geelstaart’s flummoxing take on prog, noise, and post-rock seems to capture both the immensity and absurdity of this same spectrum. Witnessing this young Dutch dynamo perform repeatedly sparks the question “Are bands...