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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