MetalSucks

“Luminance” — from the Creative Eclipses EP — was the very first Cave In song I ever heard, sandwiched incongruously between I-don’t-even-remember-what on a mix-tape my friend XandrewX made me in… 1999, I guess. From thereon in I jumped headlong into the world of Cave In, and Jupiter pretty much blew my mind when I heard it. Though it didn’t make the MetalSucks 21 Best Albums of the 21st Century… So Far clusterfuck list, it was damn close to the top of my own list for that poll.

Needless to say I was pretty fucking stoked when super-drummer J.R. Connors launched into the drum-roll intro of “Luminance” at last night’s Cave In show in Brooklyn. I was equally stoked when the band began playing “Big Riff” with, ya know, that big riff; I got goosebumps multiple times during that song. But on the whole I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little disappointed by last night’s show, just like our own Anso DF when he saw Cave In play Los Angeles last month. The sound in the venue left something to be desired, but that wasn’t it. The band was tight. They sounded good. They were energetic. They played good songs.

But I left the show feeling… un-satisfied?

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This past weekend was “The Blackened Weekend” here in NYC, a 3-night series of metal shows put on by the same folks behind the Mastodon / Neurosis show a couple of winters back and the Pig Destroyer / Brutal Truth / Repulsion joint this past summer. Krallice headlined Friday’s show with support from Liturgy, Malkuth and Orphan, while Black Anvil teamed up with Skeletonwitch to destroy the very same venue (Brooklyn’s Union Pool) on Saturday night. Last night’s weekend-ending show was the grand poobah of The Blackened Weekend headlined by the grand poobah of doom supergroups, Shrinebuilder. The band put on an energetic show to a packed house at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge — a curious choice of venue for a metal show but by no means a bad one — that, as expected, highlighted elements of all of the band-members’ respective “other” bands in the best possible way.

Friday night’s Krallice show was a rager — Union Pool was packed to the gills and even spawned a moshpit, a rarity for these types of shows. Though I had some difficulty with Krallice’s recent release Dimensional Bleedthrough, the band absolutely smoked live and proved that their show-stealing set at last winter’s Scion Rock Fest wasn’t an anomaly. Check out some fan-filmed footage from right up-front below; I doubt anyone’s going to sit through all 20 minutes, but at least watch a sample or let the audio play in the background while you go about your morning routine. The audio quality is even pretty decent.

-VN

Krallice | NYC @ Union Pool | Friday 13th November 2009 from (((unartig))) on Vimeo.

Australian metal troop The Amenta are currently touring the U.S. with Polish death troop Vader as one of way too many support bands who get abbreviated 20 minute sets on the tour. Thankfully, even with only a 20 minute set, The Amenta made traveling into Manhattan on a Saturday night worth it; their powerful set was equal parts modern death metal and neo-industrial and their stage presence was captivating. Place The Amenta firmly in the “bands to watch” category.

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It’s easy to be jaded after attending a billion or so live shows, but climbing the hill up to San Manuel Amphitheatre, the site of Cypress Hill’s MetalSucks co-sponsored SmokeOut festival, I was transformed into a gawking greenhorn. (I would soon be treated like one, as well.) Behind my rib cage,  calm battled with rising euphoria, and not only because I stood with a hefty joint in my shoe at the gates of a tri-county puff-athon on the nicest late-October Saturday ever; mostly, I was just tweaking to look in on a magnificent but savagely wounded band at this early stage of recovery. Yes, the SmokeOut would feature the Deftones, who have played around ten shows since an auto accident left their bassist, Chi Cheng, in a coma. And despite the puzzling news that to-be sixth album Eros had been shelved, the band already had been showing positive signs and seemed poised to reintroduce themselves via a violent new song (“Rocket Skates”) and a spritely, newly-slimmed singer (the gossip had Chino Moreno at anywhere between twenty and eighty pounds lighter). Exciting!

Two hours later, right before the Deftones took the stage, night had fallen, the denizens of the cheap seats waded ankle-deep in litter, and I was pissed off as shit.

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Photo by Greg Aiello

On Friday night, Vince and I saw Living Colour live for what I think must have been the seventh or maybe eighth time. And it’s a testament to the abilities of this band that, in a day and age when so many groups are seemingly just going through the motions, we’ve really never seen the same Living Colour show twice. These dudes just seem to come from another time and place – an era when a live performance wasn’t about doing a note-for-note recreation of your albums so much as it was about creating a unique experience for the audience. In that regard, Living Colour still delivers in spades.

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Upon first hearing that Eyehategod would be performing a New York City show on a boat, my immediate thought was, “That fucker is gonna sink.” My subsequent thought was, “I want to go to this.” And so I did. With a considerably steep $40 ticket price, one might think that attendees paid for the novelty of the experience, and to an extent, they’d be right. Yet coupled with headliner-quality openers like Pig Destroyer and Goatwhore, it was actually quite a bargain.

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Mastodon were damn good last night. It was my third time seeing them this year (!) and nothing is ever going to top seeing them at a 500-cap venue this past May… but I’ll fight you if you say Mastodon aren’t one of the greatest bands of our generation.

Dethklok were actually a lot more entertaining than I was expecting. The idea of seeing a cartoon band live is off-putting at first, but the bandmembers certainly have the chops and the video screen presentation made the whole thing work. It was fun.

Anyway, here’s the official video for Mastodon’s “Oblivion”; I’d post a live video, but the vocals are always embarrassing. Love this video anyway.

Sadly no beards attacked me and took me on magical journeys at the show last night (though Kip’s man-whiskers are looking mighty tough as of late). Did you read Tres Crow’s piece of creative writing, “The Mastodon Beard“? You should.

-VN

Cave In shows weren’t always fraught with apprehension, as was last week’s support set to Coalesce at Hollywood’s Knitting Factory. It’s weird but the whole experience came into sharp focus, actually, upon my exit from the club. Opposite the silly L. Ron Hubbard library stood a vendor and her rack of sizzling, spitting hot dogs. The price was right, dinnertime was hours past, and I love hot dogs. And though each was wrapped in unnecessary bacon, I happily forked over my three bucks only to be handed a cold frank on a foam-rubber bun topped with streaks of revoltingly white mayonnaise. Staring down at Anita Baker’s star on the Walk of Fame, I felt like crying. Was I hungry enough to choke down this corruption of an American classic?

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Last night I told Burst vocalist Linus Jägerskog -  a truly chill dude who not only works his band’s merch booth, but is more than happy to pose for photos, sign shit, etc. – that he broke my heart. How could this be the first time we were seeing them live? And why oh why was it the last?

Burst were fucking great, man. So great that when the shitard behind me yelled “Stand up, you faggot!” at guitarist Robert Reinholdz (who was, for reasons I’m not clear about, seated for the entire performance) and then called for Jägerskog to “hang yourself tonight,” I seriously considered throwing my beer at him. And if any band that wasn’t Gojira was going on after Burst, getting kicked out of the show to defend the Swedes’ honor might have seemed totally worth it.

But GOJIRA. Wow. Here are some random thoughts that ran through my brain as we watched them give the best show of the year so far for the second time this year:

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I had kind of a stunning realization last night as I watched Alice in Chains blow the roof off Irving Plaza/The Fillmore/whatever the fuck it’s called now. It was during the second song of the band’s ninety minute set, “Again.” (The show opener was “Rain When I Die,” in case you’re curious.) New vocalist William DuVall (well at this point he’s not really new anymore, but I guess he’s new-ish) didn’t just sing the phrase “Again and again and again” – he belted it, jumping up onto the monitors to give himself just a little extra boost in the rockstar god department. Then, as it came time for him to grunt and signal the start of the “Doo-doo, doo-doo” sing-along section (and sing along the crowd did), DuVall lept off the monitor and started pumping his fist in the air, prompting the audience to do the same. As he finally turned to face drummer Sean Kinney, Kinney started grinning; and then the grin spread across the stage like an infectious disease, and by the end of the song, guitarist Jerry Cantrell and bassist Mike Inez were smiling, too.

And that’s when it hit me. It was kind of a morbid epiphany, especially for someone who held deceased vocalist Layne Staley in as high regard as I did, but it was an important epiphany for a fan who hopes to follow this band into their future. Here it is:

Layne Staley did not want to be with us here tonight.

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It’s not like there weren’t slams at Saturday’s edition of New England Deathfest: Sexcrement and Putrid Pile had them in spades. But Sunday was the Slam Expo to Saturday’s Death Metal Enthusiasts Convention, finally acknowledging the dirtbag elephant in the room: while many will always admire brutal technical death metal and deathcore has become child’s play, slam is THE big thing in death metal right now, divisive as it is. Though it’s redundancy can lead to DMF (once again, Death Metal Fatigue) more easily than other death metal strains, it has great potential for ridiculous heaviness. This made Sunday a little less rewarding than Saturday, but also a lot more fun. Though it’s hard to say if slam is here to stay, it’s certainly here right now, and if Deathfest wanted to be a proper barometer for what’s going on in death metal, it would have to at least tip its hat to slam, if not give it its hat for a while altogether.

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The defining moment of the first day of this year’s New England Deathfest – in its second year and already a promising presence on the US metal festival circuit – was the late in the evening set by Wisconsin brutal death outfit Putrid Pile. Or, rather, by Shaun LaCanne, the one man behind the band. Dressed in baggy shorts, a completely unreadable death metal logo shirt, a Devourment hat, and cheapest-frames-they-had-at-Lenscrafters glasses, the man proceeded to play an unrelenting array of blistering death grind with ridiculous slam riffs, croaking gutturally on top of it. While he didn’t headbang or thrash around – his hat remained on his head throughout the whole set – the crowd adored it. As he slammed, the crowd moved with him: a quick survey of the audience during his/the band’s performance revealed a few flailing bodies in a sea of sweaty heads all nodding to the beat in eerie unison. It was a strangely beautiful sight: a relatively sizable crowd of people, half warmed by a glut of $2.50 Presidentes from the bar and half overjoyed by the presence of a pretty obscure death metal band (thought there was obviously a considerable overlap), all incredibly fixated on one average-as-fuck looking guy playing brutal death riffs to a drum machine, with nothing else accompanying him onstage. It should have been boring and unwatchable – the other two one-man acts on Deathfest that day certainly tried one’s patience over the course of their thirty-five minute sets – but instead, it demanded your attention, and rewarded it upon its receipt.

This was the beauty of Deathfest personified: in an age where death meta — a genre initially extreme and violently uncommercial by nature – has become triggered, watered down child’s play fit for the consumption of hardcore kids sick of breakdowns and barking, New England Deathfest exists for those who view it as an invaluable commodity and not a layover between trends. The festival’s downsides – an overwhelmingly disproportionate ratio of men to women and the risk of homogeneity among them – were overshadowed by the purity of the event, the idea that the metal underground isn’t a waiting room for the Lambs of God and Mastodons of tomorrow, but a place where people who like this one thing – this one abrasive, horrific, indigestible-to-99%-of-the-populous thing – can adore and revere it communally, fostering a beautifully dogged loyalty. There were no pretensions of Hot Topic-elevated fame or pseudo-stardom, but instead the idea that the man up on stage could be you or me – hell, I’m pretty sure he may be my IT guy – but happens to play a seven string really fucking fast and have a good sense of how to slow things down as menacingly as possible. In a world as splintered as metal, it’s fascinating to see that there’s this corner of it with dozens of bands you’ve never heard of, complete with fans that will sit through eight hours of blasting and slams to see them onstage, even if it’s just one guy. Deathfest was as much Star Trek convention as it was metal festival: for two days, people mingled with other people to whom extremer-than-extreme death metal was the greatest thing in the world, an alternate universe where people took death metal seriously and treated it not as an occasion to put their fingers in their ears.

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On Thursday night Vince and I got to go see Living Colour perform their soon-to-be-released new album, The Chair in the Doorway, in its entirety, for an audience of maybe fifty people in a small rehearsal space in Brooklyn.

Needless to say, it was friggin’ awesome.

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Last night, I was among the privileged few permitted to attend the Nine Inch Nails show at Webster Hall, the second of four sold-out NYC club shows from the arena-filling industrial rock act. The setlist from the previous night at Bowery Ballroom appeared heavy with newer songs, which admittedly had me pretty skeptical walking into one of my least favorite venues in this city. That fat stinking sweaty territorial assholes had commandeered spots on the balcony railings to bootleg the show only added to my sense of dread that the show would disappoint. I found a halfway decent spot on the upper level and braced myself for the shitty sight lines and poor ventilation that defines Webster Hall concert experience.

Fortunately, Trent Reznor had something special in store for the crowd that would make up for everything: playing the entire The Downward Spiral LP from start to finish.

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The second annual Progressive Nation Tour — featuring a re-jiggered and suddenly worth seeing lineup of Scale the Summit, Bigelf and Zappa Plays Zappa supporting Dream Theater — hit New York’s historic Beacon Theater on Sunday night. This year’s proggier leaning lineup (last year’s had Opeth, BTBAM and 3 in the support slots) brought out an older-skewed audience, but as is always remarkably the case with Dream Theater there were plenty of youngins in attendance. In fact, the most frequently spotted band t-shirt I saw all night was for The Faceless; stew on that one for a second.

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This past Saturday night, Vince and Axl bought tickets to hipster-douche fest All Points West with the express purpose of seeing Tool and Tool only. There was a serious and very visible divide in the crowd – namely, other metalheads vs. people who think Interpol is cool  – and your MetalSucks editors were privy to some pretty funny dialogue as a result:

1. “I think they’re called, like, ‘Tools?’”
2. <robot voice>”Intergalactic, planetary. Planetary, intergalactic.” </robot voice>
3. Beat-boxing.
4. “Gogol Bordello are awesome.”
5. “Please don’t block my view of the stage.”
6. “There won’t be any moshing. Look at all that mud! No one wants to get dirty.”
7. “Where are the fried Oreos?”
8. Scowling at Axl’s Slayer shirt.
9. Scowling at Vince’s Paganfest shirt.
10. “What’s that smell?”

No matter; Tool kicked major ass anyways. It’s like there’s an unspoken agreement between the band and their fans: “You bring the weed. We’ll bring the lasers.”

Here’s Tool at All Points West on Saturday night, performing with special guest drummer Frank Ferrer of Guns N’ Roses fame.

-AR & VN

Last night I had the privilege of attending the latest in the monthly series of Pitchfork’s Show No Mercy metal shows in Brooklyn, featuring Stats, Defeatist, Unearthly Trance, and Minsk supporting Keelhaul. I arrived a fan of Minsk — who certainly did not disappoint with their epic blend of doom, prog, sludge and punk — but I left a newly converted fan of Keelhaul, whose razor-tight set of angular post-metal riffs justly lived up to show promoter Brandon Stosuy’s description as “muscular.” Keelhaul absolutely fucking killed it, their furious Coalesce-on-steroids onslaught leaving me wondering how this band had slipped beneath my radar for so long.

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If you’ve been reading this site on a regular basis, you’re aware that I’ve been very, very, very excited for this past Friday night’s Brutal Truth/Pig Destroyer/Repulsion show, and I was not let down.

There were some minor hiccups – Repulsion went on nearly an hour later than scheduled, which might not have been so bothersome if the Brooklyn Masonic Temple wasn’t hotter than the fucking sun, or even if you didn’t have to wait on not one but two lines to get a drink (one to get your drink ticket, the other to get your actual drink). Plus, when Repulsion started playing, they seemed to be having sound issues for a few songs (compounded by the fact that moshers kept slamming into the soundboard which, for reasons beyond me, was on a platform on unlocked wheels), and no one thought to bring down the house lights until part way through the set. Also, I felt a little bad for Brutal Truth – they killed, as expected, but a substantial portion of the crowd filed out following Pig Destroyer, who ended up being the night’s true headliners.

Then again… of course Pig Destroyer ended up being the night’s true headliners. Not only did they kill as expected (and their 45 minute-ish set felt wwwaaaayyy too short), but Blake Harrison had power tools on stage for the express purpose of making needless semi-pyro. Power tools!!!

ANYWAY, there was a whole lotta stage divin’ throughout the night. But during Pig Destroyer’s last song, it seemed like there were at least a dozen people on stage, all going nuts and stage diving at once. Below you can watch some not-so-great footage of the event that I found on YouTube (thanks, presspass!). If anyone has any better footage of this or any other part of the show, hit me up!

-AR

Ahh, Michigan. We have lakes. Big fucking lakes. We used to have a booming car industry, but unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past six months, you need not an explanation of why I won’t be speaking of that in this article. Besides, we harbor a little music festival every summer called Dirt Fest, a metal get together a few hours outside of Detroit, founded by two dudes looking to showcase their own band. Dirt Fest quickly became the summer festival for local bands looking for recognition and inspiration. It wound up becoming comparable to the one hot chick at the party which turned out to be a sausage fest – she ends up having such a good time that she lets everyone have a turn.

Anyhoo, thirteen lucky summers later and Dirt Fest is rocking a roster that has, in the past, included bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan and The Black Dahlia Murder. Obviously something is working if these bands are rolling through, so I decided to finally go check it out this year. Armed with nothing but a delicious bottle of Jagermeister and a set of tits everyone at the MetalSucks Mansion is dying to get a look at, I embarked on what turned out to be a very interesting day. My mouth already tasted like booze before noon…

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After last week’s announcement that ex-Himsa axeman Matt Wicklund would be playing with God Forbid on this summer’s Mayhem Fest and that God Forbid’s Doc Coyle would be filling in on bass for Trivium for at least one show, I expressed interest in hearing from any readers who caught the gig.

Well, one of you, Ryan Wineman, did indeed e-mail me over the weekend. Here’s his report:

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