I’m a very moody person. Make a lame joke and I’ll be giggling in an instant. Say one off-color comment and I’ll explode in your face. Mention dead puppies and I’ll start bawling. Maybe that’s why a band like Creature Creature, that changes emotions on a dime, is just right for me.

Look at any promo shot of the band and you might think they’re brooding, with their dark outfits and vocalist Morrie’s intense, Bella Lugosi-esquestare. But seeing them live on September 19, 2011 at Harajuku Astro Hall as part of their Exorcising Orpheus Tour, anyone can discover that their music is much more than the doom and gloom their visuals suggest.

In a venue that holds only a few hundred people and doesn’t allow for big splashy visual effects, the focus really does fall on the music’s ability to sway the collective audience emotion one way or the other.Astro Hall is small with a tight, compact stage. With the five members of Creature Creature standing up there, it all looked a bit cramped. That being said, once the show started, you would think the band was playing with the emotions of 400,000 instead of 400.

The band came out to an ambient instrumental before exploding into “Dream Caller.” Hitoki’s bass reverberated off the back wall, pounding like an overburdened heart while Sakura’s drums stomped angrilyat the audience’s feet. In the meantime, guitarists Shinobu and Hiro tickled their strings with precision and skill. Individually, the instruments seemed perfectly sane. But put them together and the melancholy sound was punctuated with an exuberant guitar riff, a rage-filled tune was somehow level-headed and, in the end, calm.

None of this seemed logical, but it did feel entirely deliberate. Morrie is a master of an omniscient, baritone vibrato that possesses a powerful poison.The audience almost seemed inebriated, their emotions completely out of their own control.At one point, Morrie slowly swooped his hand above them, and about a hundred heads and pairs of hands followed. From above, it looked like an illusionist magically opening a velvet curtain without so much as breathing on it.

Songs like “Hien” and “Cosmos Blackness” have bursts of rage and sorrow, throwing each piece of music into different, chaotic directions. But they all eventually come back to some central mood, showing a rare level of maturity that is rational and dangerous at the same time. It’s an explosion, but a controlled explosion that burns with precision.

As the audience begged for a third encore (and was pleasantly and unexpectedly obliged with one), I realized that even after seeing some of these songs performed live three or four times, I felt acutely different with each listen. The first time I heard “Paradise,” I interpreted it as a by-the-book rock number. This time around there was sort of forlorn frustration, like the thing I wanted most was just out of reach. Even within my own person, the complexity of Creature Creature’s emotional control is a unique experience every time. I write a lot about such base emotions as sad and mad, but the band incites something even more profound: excitement and wonder.