The Madness Engine

You don’t find Coco LeBree — he erupts into your life, all teeth and fever and leather fringe, barefoot on the wrong floor of the hotel, insisting he’s seen the future and it’s made entirely of bees and broken radios. Born John Konstantin LeBree, though the name never quite fit — too clean, too Catholic — he shed it like an old skin sometime between his first delusion and the night he carved a lightning bolt into his chest before a show in Munich.

He is the chaos agent. The wild card. The grinning specter in nuclear test goggles, slurring poetry about sun gods and electric fences. And when he’s on — really on — it’s like plugging the cosmos into an amplifier and screaming into the void just to hear the echo roll back smiling.

To say he’s unstable is to say that fire is warm. Coco doesn’t just flirt with the edge — he lives there, sipping strange cocktails of intuition and instability, spitting out lyrics like incantations, laughing like a man who just heard the punchline to a joke no one else understands. He’s been called dangerous. He’s been called brilliant. He’s been called “a walking chemical reaction in panther trousers.” All of them were spot on.

But with LeBree in the room, the molecules shift. The band tightens. The music breathes differently — erratic, sharp, pulsing with that wild-eyed electricity. He doesn’t just bring energy, he distills it, ignites it, blows it into jagged art. He’s not a frontman so much as a conductor of chaos, channeling every freak current into something hypnotic and raw.

And yet, beneath the madness, there’s a madman’s sense of clarity. He’s no amateur — LeBree knows songcraft like a butcher knows cuts. He can whittle a tune down to its feral heart, or blow it up into a multi-headed hydra of theatrical excess. And while the band’s more meditative minds often drift into abstraction, Coco is the closing gavel, the voice that grounds the vision, the clashing combatant that brings the concept home.

He’s left the band more times than anyone can count. He’s been arrested mid-tour, disappeared mid-set, once even faked his own death in a Hungarian bathhouse. But then he comes roaring back. Because The Get Quick without Coco isn’t quite The Get Quick. It’s a car that can’t crash. A potent spell without the final word.

If Mitch Joy is the spine, and Erik the nervous system, then LeBree is the lightning bolt that juices the stitched-together corpse back to life — laughing, screaming, and demanding to be heard.

— Mark Question, 2007