Watch: The Faceless’ Michael Keene Goes On Incoherent Onstage Rant, Starts Headlining Set Two Hours Late
It’s no secret that The Faceless‘ Michael Keene has had some issues in the past. The entire band quit around him in March of 2018, and later that year he played a disastrous festival show where they showed up 10 hours late to their set and only played a handful of songs. Later that month, Keene was rushed to the hospital with muscle spasms, forcing his new band to play as a quartet. One might hope that all this calamity would set Keene straight, but according to some fan-shot footage from last night’s show in LA, he’s still a fucking mess.
Last night, The Faceless were scheduled to headline LA’s 1720 over Throne of Tyranny, A Fractured Thought, and Ubiquity, but unfortunately, things went terribly awry. As you’ll see in fan-show footage from the Instagram stories of metal vocalist Eli Arnold, Keene takes the stage 45 minutes after the band were supposed to start playing, and launches into a blithering, incoherent rant about how he had a neurological disorder and needed an MRI. Joining him onstage is former The Faceless drummer Aaron Stechauner, who practically begs Keene to get the band’s shit set up and start the show, and then goes on the play a series of improvised drum fills in order to keep people from leaving.
As Arnold later put it in his stories:
“So I just ended up coming back home, because it was like an hour and a half later, and they still had not set up their instruments at all, with no explanation as to why it was taking so long. So, yeah, didn’t get to see The Faceless tonight!”
Arnold goes on to note that he heard the band kicked things off two hours late — at which point, he’d already been home for 10 minutes.
As our reader Ricky Bobby mentioned when he brought this to our attention (thanks, Ricky), Keene seems, simply put, high as fuck. You might argue he was actually having a psychotic episode of some kind, but he does not seem to be unhinged or emotionally fraught, just super rambly and incoherent and high.
We hope Michael gets the help he needs, but he needs to get it before he plays another show. This is a huge insult to people who payed money to see him, to the bands playing alongside him, and to his bandmates.
Check out the video in Eli Arnold’s Instagram stories, but here are some screenshots below:
