This is the second part of a two-part post about the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour’s performances in Seattle and Portland on August 20 and 21. In Part 1, we gave our impressions about the music and posted photos of about half the bands performing in Seattle.

Today, we have a random assortment of observations about our two days of metal in the Pacific Northwest, plus photos of all the bands at the show in Portland.

None of us here at NCS know what the fuck we’re doing with a camera. We like to justify our ineptitude by telling ourselves it’s just like the DIY ethic of underground metal. We also like to make excuses that divert attention from our complete lack of training, such as the constantly changing or almost non-existent light, the non-stop motion on stage, the distance from which we’re taking the photos, and — most important — the fact that we go to shows to listen to the fucking music, not to take photos, so there’s a limit to how much time we’re going to spend snapping away like a fucking tourist.

But, despite our manifold shortcomings as photojournalists, we think these pics are just barely good enough to share, so we’re sharing them — a lot of them, since 11 bands played in Portland and we didn’t miss out on any of them.  (after the jump . . .)

But before the photos, some random observations about what we saw, heard, and did:

In Seattle, SUMMER SLAUGHTER played at a club called Studio Seven, with an advertised capacity of about 550 people. It looked like the place was about as full as it could get, and by the time Vital Remains started playing at around 3:00 in the afternoon (the first of the bands on the national tour), it was already pretty full.

With the club that packed, the crowd energy got intense, and especially so when Lenzig Leal (the frontman for Cephalic Carnage) came on stage with a big video camera. He explained that he’d been making videos of the crowds at every stop on the tour, looking for the most brutal mosh pit in the U.S. and Canada. Up to that point, he said Vancouver B.C. and another city (the name of which I didn’t catch) were tied for first.

He then threw down the gauntlet to the Studio Seven crowd and launched into “Endless Cycle of Violence”. And holy fucking shit! The entire floor erupted into a maelstrom of bodies like nothing I’ve ever seen. As I said, there was no room to move, and yet the whole place boiled into violent motion — and I mean absolutely no fucking around.

For several songs, Leal screamed and gurgled and barked with his mic in one hand and that video camera pointed at the crowd with the other, and the floor continued to pitch and heave and collide in a frenzy. It was intense and exciting and scary as shit.

24 hours later we’re in Portland at the venerable Roseland Theater, with a capacity of 1480. At the start of the afternoon, one of the dudes who manages the place told me that they were only expecting about 500 paying customers — so about the same draw as Seattle, but in a place almost three times as big. So the crowd on the main floor was more spread out, and it spread out even more when the theater opened the balcony about half-way through the show.

Leal gave the same speech as he did in Seattle, video camera in hand, except this time he proclaimed that Seattle’s pit was the most brutal he had yet seen on the tour. He issued the same challenge to the Portland crowd. The crowd responded, but the excess space diminished the impact considerably. Don’t know what he said in SF at the tour’s final performance last night, but I’m assuming Seattle was still at the top of the mosh heap.

Leal also had far and away the best song introduction of the night, dedicating a 30-second grindcore tune “Perpetual General Arousal D____” (couldn’t make out the last word) to all the chronic masturbators in the audience, and then extolling the virtues of masturbating 4 or 5 times a day.

More random observations:

In Portland, Jonathan Huber, the missing-in-action vocalist for Seattle’s deathcore upstarts I Declare War, bolted on stage during one of The Red Chord’s songs, grabbed a spare mic, belted out some of his trademark gutturals, and was then gone like a ghost. (That’s him, walking away with a mic in his hand, in the last of our Red Cord photos below.) I still haven’t heard why he left IDW’s recently concluded national tour in mid-stream or what his future plans are.

We’ve already written that, in our humble opinions, Animals As Leaders stole the show in both cities. My sometimes NCS collaborator Alexis chatted up Tobin Abasi at the merch table in Portland and got him to autograph an AAL t-shirt — which she will now never wear or wash.

Bill Robinson, Decrepit Birth’s stoner frontman, took a massive hit of weed from a doobie that someone in the audience managed to hand up to him over the crowd barricade at the start of the set. When the smoke came out, it looked like a fucking mushroom cloud, lit up a dozen colors in the spotlights. Visual proof of the lung capacity required to sing death-metal vocals. (I think the dude fired up again much later in the evening at the merch table, because we were over on that side of the floor at the time, and I got a contact high for about 10 minutes.)

Refreshingly, both venues were almost entirely devoid of scene kids. All that unadulterated death metal must have functioned like scenester insect repellant.

It hurts your back to stand for more than 9 hours if you don’t have a job that keeps you on your feet all day. It looked like about 100 people eventually gave up in Portland and moved to the balcony where there was seating. I was sympathetic for sure, but on the other hand, I don’t think of live death metal as a spectator sport that you gaze down upon from balcony seating. On the third hand, no one ever accused me of having any sense.

But I do have enough sense to know it’s time to stop with the words and start with the photos.  Here you go — the bands who played at SUMMER SLAUGHTER in Portland, beginning with a local deathcore act called Regiment 26:

REGIMENT 26

VITAL REMAINS

ANIMALS AS LEADERS

CARNIFEX

DECREPIT BIRTH

CEPHALIC CARNAGE

VEIL OF MAYA

THE RED CHORD

ALL SHALL PERISH

THE FACELESS

DECAPITATED

This year’s edition of THE SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour was a celebration of death metal in some of its more brutal and technical flavors — and one out-of-place wild card that stole the show. In this case, “stealing the show” is a relative term, because the line-up of bands was so strong.

In fact, with allowances for the extremity of our musical tastes here at NCS, this was as consistently solid a line-up, from start to finish, as any tour in recent memory: Vital Remains, Animals As Leaders, Carnifex, Decrepit Birth, Cephalic Carnage, Veil of Maya, The Red Chord, All Shall Perish, The Faceless, and Decapitated.

In fact, we were so stoked about this tour that we decided to see it both in Seattle last Friday and again in Portland the next day. The tour’s last show is in San Francisco tonight, so we were catching the bands near the end of a long summer haul that no doubt wore them out. But you couldn’t tell that from the way they played. If we didn’t have day jobs and were closer to SF, we’d be tempted to take in a third performance — it was that good.

As usual, we took a crapload of photos at both performances. And in fact, most of them are crap. But we’ve been painstakingly sorting through them to find the least crappy ones that we wouldn’t be too embarrassed to share.

So, today, we’ve got some high-level reactions to what we heard from all the bands, plus photos from the Seattle tour stop. Tomorrow (now at this location), we’ll have some random observations about the scene and the crowds and a few other thoughts that aren’t really in the nature of a review, plus the best photos from the Portland show (which are a bit better than the ones we’re posting today).  (continue after the jump . . .)

Last Friday, my sometimes NCS collaborator Alexis and I got to Studio Seven in Seattle in the middle of the afternoon, missing the performance of the local Seattle band that started the bill, but in time to catch the performance of the first national act, Vital Remains. I left after Cephalic Carnage because I knew we were hitting the road early the next morning for Portland and I still had shit to do before I could leave town. Alexis and another friend stayed almost to the end.

The next day, my other sometimes NCS collaborator IntoTheDarkness joined us for the drive to Portland and the next stop of the tour at The Roseland Theater. So Alexis basically saw the whole line-up twice, I saw it one and a half times, and ITD saw it once.

Our musical tastes don’t match up completely. We all like a wide range of metal, but ITD is a deathcore afficionado, Alexis generally prefers more melodic music, and I’m more of a straight-ahead death-metal fan. Surprisingly, the band that all three of us thought was the show-stealer was the one band that didn’t fit the profile of this tour at all — Animals As Leaders.

We saw AAL in Seattle in April (reviewed here), along with Dillinger Escape Plan and Darkest Hour, and we’re now planning to see them again when they return to Seattle in November with what appear to be a bunch of non-metal bands we’ve never heard of (Circa Survive, Dredg, and Code Seven).

Tosin Abasi (guitar) and Navene Koperweis (drums) are simply amazing, and Javier Reyes is no slouch either — an amazingly tight, technically jaw-dropping group of performers playing intricate, heavy, beautiful instrumentals. Just stunning shit.

And in both Seattle and Portland, the crowd gave them a very enthusiastic response, even though they couldn’t have been a draw for most of the fans who paid to see this tour. The mosh pit even erupted on AAL’s last song in Seattle, which Abasi announced in a surprising death-metal guttural!

Deathcore addicts got a good fix from Carnifex and All Shall Perish. We all got especially severe neck-sprain from All Shall Perish’s set of memorable, blast-furnace songs. The drummer had one of those devices that, when struck with the stick, causes a triggered boom that feels like an earthquake in your intestinal tract, and he used it at the onset of each breakdown to good effect.

In their most recent album, Hell Chose Me, Carnifex seems to be inching away from deathcore and toward more straight death-metal, but the biggest crowd-pleasers were the band’s older deathcore standards, “Lie To My Face” and “The Diseased and the Poisoned”.

Breakdowns weren’t the sole province of those deathcore bands. Veil of Maya included some crushers, too, but mixed with a high level of technicality in the playing. For me, they were the big surprise of the Portland show (I left before seeing them in Seattle). Tremendously high energy — like the stage was packed with fissionable material that had just been set off — and fascinating instrumental work. I really enjoyed the hell out of their set.

The Red Chord had a few breakdowns, too, but they’ve pretty much shed the deathcore label with their latest awesome album, Fed Through the Teeth Machine. None of us thought the band sounded nearly as good on stage as they did on that CD — the sound came off too muddy, without enough separation in the instruments. Vocalist Guy Kozowyk also had a strange, lengthy monologue in Portland about bassist Greg Weeks’ latest bout with an X-Men video game that seemed to have no connection to anything.

I’d never seen Cephalic Carnage or Vital Remains before, and they were also eye-openers. Vital Remains has been around longer than all the bands on this tour, but they were the opening act. Bludgeoning, riff-heavy, straight-ahead death metal. Not much discernible difference from song to song, and vocalist Scott Wily’s growls grew monotonous (at least for me), but they got the crowd into the right spirit both nights, and it was undeniably some heavy shit.

Cephalic Carnage offered up a generous helping of grindcore, a big dose of freaked-out death metal, and 100% mayhem. Lenzig Leal is a funny-as-shit frontman, with his constant comments about weed and a nice dedication to all the chronic masturbators in the audience.

Nick Schendzielos (bass and backing vocals) and new guitarist Brian Hopp fly and bounce and headbang around the stage with abandon while they’re playing. Quite a sight, and the music is energizing cacophony (more about the mosh pits during this band’s performances tomorrow).

John Merryman is also amazing to watch behind the drumkit. His playing is intricate and fast as lightning, and yet it seems almost effortless — he barely seems to be moving above the elbows.

Decrepit Birth was another blast to watch on stage. Vocalist Bill Robinson, who looks like, and apparently is, a homeless person, has got tons of charisma and funny banter to accompany his satisfyingly cavernous death-metal growls.

Most of the other musicians all seem to be new touring members of the band, but their playing is technically sharp and intricate — and the bassist and one of the guitarists look like they’re about 18. Their fresh-faced, clean-cut appearance next to Robinson’s matted beard and dreads was an interesting sight.

And that brings me to the last two acts of the show. The Faceless was another show-stealer. Despite their name, I’m tempted to call them the face of modern death metal. We’d seen them before, were blown away then, and were even more head-over-heels impressed with them this time. Their live set faithfully captures the technical intricacy of the recorded music, while supercharging it with intense live energy.

Decapitated ended the night, and it was just amazingly cool to see this band on stage, resurrected from the bonfire of their apparent demise in the bus accident that killed Vitek and left Covan in a coma. Vogg has reconstituted the band with new members, and they sounded awesome. The crowd in Portland had been through a very long day and night of metal by the time these dudes took the stage, but the place came alive when they cranked up the first song.

The playing was tight, crushing, and rhythmically convulsive, and these dudes definitely get the tour award for best non-stop windmilling.

Enough words for today. Time for photos. The following are the best of the half-assed shots I could manage at Studio Seven in Seattle before leaving for the night. So, I don’t have pics of any of the bands that followed Cephalic Carnage in Seattle. But I do have photos of all the bands in Portland, and we’ll put up the best of those tomorrow, along with some additional comments about these two shows.

VITAL REMAINS

ANIMALS AS LEADERS

CARNIFEX

DECREPIT BIRTH

CEPHALIC CARNAGE

Really a slow start here at NCS today. The three of us who put this thing together piled into a van at the crack of dawn yesterday and drove from Seattle to Portland, got settled in to the place where we were staying, and showed up early for the start of the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour.

About 9 1/2 hours later, we stumbled out of The Roseland Theater with aching body parts and heads filled with a complete deluge of metal. By the time we got something to eat and made it back to where we were staying, it was a really late night. And now it’s a really late morning.

The show was stupendously good, with no real weak spots in the performances from start to finish and lots of high points. We took a gazillion photos that will take some time to sort through and edit. We’ll put up the best of the bunch as soon as we can, along with photos we took when this same tour was in Seattle two nights ago.

For now, The Faceless is on my mind. I thought their performance and Animals As Leaders’ were the best of a very strong night. So, until we get our shit better together and put up a more complete post for today, there’s some Faceless music after the jump and a few more photos of the band performing last night in Portland.

Here’s a song to accompany your perusal of some of our photos:

The Faceless: Akeldama

THE FACELESS at Roseland Theater  Aug 21, 2010

SUMMER SLAUGHTER was in Seattle last night. I went with one of my NCS cohorts (Alexis) but left after Cephalic Carnage. Why? Because all the perpetrators of this site are  leaving at the crack of dawn to drive to Portland today. Why? To see SUMMER SLAUGHTER in Portland. Why? Don’t ask.

So, I’ll get to see the first 5 bands twice. For now, three words:

Animals. As. Leaders.

More words:

Cephalic. Carnage.

Soilwork is in the midst of a headlining tour in support of its recent album The Panic Broadcast, and the three perpetrators of NO CLEAN SINGING were in the audience when the tour blew through El Corazon in Seattle on July 27.

The bands on this tour are an interesting mix. No two of them play the same style of metal. We had Soilwork’s melodic metalcore, Death Angel’s supercharged thrash, hyper-technical death metal from Augury, Mutiny Within’s aggressive power metal, Swashbuckle’s pirate thrash, and melodic death metal from Seattle’s Deathmocracy.

It was also a long night, and those (like us) who were there from start to finish got their money’s worth: Deathmocracy took the stage at about 7 p.m., and Soilwork finished a 90-minute set at 12:30 in the morning. In a nutshell, we got thoroughly deep-fried in a vat of molten metal.

In this post, we’ll give you some brief notes on the performances and a collection of our reliably half-assed photos of each band — after the jump.

DEATHMOCRACY

We hadn’t seen this Seattle band before, and they had the typical disadvantage of playing to a small early crowd at the beginning of a long night. They played ramped-up melodic death metal and had some decent technical chops. But my favorite song was one that began with a slow, melodic instrumental and then built up to a headbanging romp.

On the downside, the band sounded out-of-step with each other in too many places — not nearly as tight as we’d like. Here are a few shots of their set:

SWASHBUCKLE

Hell yeah! New Jersey pirate metal in all its glory! These dudes thrashed the hell out of their set (and the crowd), and Admiral Nobeard (the lead vocalist with the big beard) was a fuckin’ hoot with his ‘tween-song banter.

These dudes are definitely all about having fun, and they charged up the crowd with a punk-thrash onslaught that got the pit going without invitation. The phrase “rum, sodomy, and the lash” kept flitting through my head. (If you’re not familiar with the phrase, google it.)  Here are your photos:

MUTINY WITHIN

These dudes are touring machines. This is the third time we’ve seen them in Seattle over about the last 12 months — which is pretty amazing, given that Seattle is way off in the fucking corner of the country — and they always seem to hitch a ride on tours with some pretty awesome veteran bands at the top of the bill.

We’ve had a tough time warming up to them, mainly because of Chris Clancy’s vocals. The rest of the band are a tight, accomplished group of instrumentalists who can really get you moving, and the songs are catchy. But Clancy — who undoubtedly has a great set of pipes — has had troubles hitting his clean notes in a live setting every time we’ve seen him. Too many of them are flat, which is a big distraction, because most of the singing is of the clean variety.

Having heard these songs now for the third time, they’re starting to grow on me, but selfishly, I wish Clancy would pour on more of the harsh vocals, because the dude has got a great paint-blistering howl when he uses it. Photos:

AUGURY

This was the second time we’d seen this Montreal band, and they blew me away again. The songs are extraordinarily intricate, with rapid time-signature shifts and counterpoint rhythms. All the band members play complex lines of their own that must be precisely in sync for this kind of music to work — and they pulled it off flawlessly. Pretty fucking amazing to watch.

Frontman and co-lead guitarist Patrick Loisel is just as seemingly insane as he was the first time we saw Augury. He’s just over 40 and in his day job, he teaches history and science. We sure never had any teachers like this. Here are a few of our Augury pics:

DEATH ANGEL

Holeeee shit! I’ve found my new favorite thrash band!

Death Angel has been around a looooong time, though they experienced a 10-year hiatus between 1991 and 2001 and underwent massive line-up changes since the founding in 1982. But the current line-up is just fucking amazing. I’m not sure it’s possible to play faster and still maintain the kind of neck-snapping groove these dudes generate.

They stepped on the accelerator so hard, the temperature went up 20 degrees, paint began to peel, lead melted, the yolk started seeping from eyeballs, and we’re pretty sure some people had spontaneous orgasms. They put an Old Sparky kind of charge into the crowd.

What made this music so convulsively powerful to me, and so interesting, was the band’s use of dynamic tempo changes within songs, even while  playing at about 1000 mph. The instrumental work was technically demanding and perfectly executed — and Rob Cavestany’s lead guitar playing was an old-school, heavy-metal dream.

Major props to Mark Osegueda’s vocals, too. The dude has got an amazingly powerful, blistering voice and he’s a real showman in front of a crowd. I was pretty blown away. How ’bout some pics?

SOILWORK

This is who we came to see. The first time we saw this band, in this same venue, was a powerful experience that puts a big smile on our faces every time we talk about it — and this set was even better.

Soilwork didn’t begin to play until 11 p.m., but as hot and rung out as we were by that point, we weren’t ready for them to stop an hour and a half later. They served up a greatest-hits version of their discography, along with “Deliverance Is Mine” and “Two Lives Worth of Reckoning” from the new album, and it was a headbanger’s delight.

Speed Strid was absolutely at the top of his game. His cleanly sung choruses were powerful and pitch-perfect, and his rough howls were fucking fierce.

Dirk Verbeuren was a wonder to behold behind the kit. His playing is so controlled, so inventive, and so seemingly effortless, and his drum solo in the middle of “Rejection Role” lit up the crowd like a Roman candle.

But what made this show even better than the last one we saw was the return of that shaven-headed guitar dynamo, Peter Wichers. His technical skills are superb, but there’s no flash-for-the-sake-of-flash. He plays with great feel for the songs and a lot of soul, and his leads and solos make these very catchy songs come even more vibrantly alive.

Very tough to pick a favorite song in this set, but the encore performance of “Stabbing the Drama” was about all that was needed to take a an exhilarated crowd and push them right over the top. Very hot shit.

On the night of May 28, Dark Tranquillity’s 2010 WE ARE THE VOID TOUR made its scheduled stop at Studio Seven in Seattle, and two of your NCS collaborators were present to take in all the awesomeness this show had to offer.

This was a must-see event for us, because Dark Tranquillity was one of the bands that first hooked us on extreme metal. And apart from the significance of that, we catch their live act whenever possible because they dependably deliver outstanding performances. Of course, they weren’t alone — Threat Signal, Mutiny Within, and local band Blood and Thunder were also on the bill.

So, here’s our report on the concert, plus we’ve got an unusually large batch of performance photos to show you after the all the verbiage.  (And if you think these photos are amateurish, you should see the hundreds we took that didn’t make the cut!)

BLOOD AND THUNDER

We’re not gonna say too much about this band’s performance here  – because we devoted a whole post to them yesterday. In a nutshell, they kicked massive amounts of ass: A great stage presence; technically excellent playing; and one catchy, headbangable song after another. This band churns out modern melodic death metal that deserves a wider audience.  (We do have some photos of the band’s performance that we didn’t put in yesterday’s post — so we’re putting those up at the end of this one.)

(stay with us after the jump for the rest of this review, plus all those photos we promised . . .)

MUTINY WITHIN

We first saw these guys more than three months ago when they were touring with Arch Enemy (see our review of that concert here) just in advance of their debut album release. We said little about them when we reviewed that show, because the power-metal style of music they play just isn’t something that appeals to us as much as the gnarlier music we tend to cover on this site.

And it still isn’t. But that’s just a matter of personal taste, and this time we decided we owe it to you and the band to say something more. So, here we go:

On the bright side, Chris Clancy does indeed have an amazing voice. When he delivers harsh vocals (which is not as often as we’d like), he sounds powerfully nasty, and he can veer on a dime from blood-curdling shrieks to deep-throated growls without missing a step. His clean vocals also display tremendous range, and as compared to the performance in February, he was more on-key this time.  We know that’s a tough thing to pull off on stage, surrounded by blast-force instrumentals, but the dude is definitely getting better at it.

And as for the instrumental work, this is a very tight band of very skilled musicians, and they play with high energy and flawless execution. We’re still not in love with the kind of music available on their album, but they do put on a pummeling performance in the flesh.

THREAT SIGNAL

This Canadian band has always been a bit of a mixed bag for us. Their sound is a blend of melodic death metal and metalcore. There’s a satisfying degree of technicality in the instrumental work, and Travis Montgomery’s riffs and solos (both on the recordings and live) are particularly impressive. And when Jon Howard belts out the harsh vocals, he’s got plenty of aggressive power.

On the other hand, although we’ve always found a few things to like in each of Threat Signal’s albums, the songs have just been too generic to draw us back to them — and we can really do without the clean vocals. They’re average at best, and didn’t sound any better live.

The Studio Seven crowd reacted pretty boisterously to Threat Signal’s high-energy set, but it wasn’t a performance we’ll remember for very long.

DARK TRANQUILLITY

We don’t think we’re capable of offering any fresh insights about Dark Tranquillity, given the amount of ink that’s been spilled about them by thousands of other writers since the band helped changed the landscape of metal beginning almost 20 years ago. Plus, we lost our objectivity about them long ago. In the case of Dark Tranquillity, your NCS co-authors are reduced to the status of slavish fanboys (and fangirl).

Having said that, no matter how much we revere this band, the shine would have dulled some by now if DT hadn’t continued to put out worthy new music — and indeed they have. Their latest release, We Are the Void, continues to deliver the Gothenberg sound as no one but Dark Tranquillity can do.

There are many cool things about living in Seattle. One of them is that the city is large enough (just barely) to attract national tours despite its remote location, yet small enough in the size of its extreme-music customer base that you get to see bands like Dark Tranquillity in a venue that’s built for hundreds instead of thousands.

Sometimes we even feel guilty that bands which deserve to be playing arenas are instead playing clubs — but not too guilty, because (selfishly speaking) we’re the beneficiaries of that disconnect.

And so it was on the night of May 28 — the chance to see a globally revered and deservedly legendary band like DT in a relatively small, immediate setting where the band and an electrified audience connected in a way that arenas and big festivals just don’t permit.

We’ll limit ourselves to just a few observations, since it’s already obvious that we think these dudes walk on water:

Mikael Stanne. He’s been performing and touring for longer than lots of his fans have been alive, and yet, is there anyone who exudes as much unadulterated joy on stage? Every time we’ve seen him, including a couple nights ago, he’s just bursting with energy, and whenever he’s not blasting out his distinctive vocals, he’s got the biggest fucking smile on his face. You can’t help but smile with him.

The multimedia show. On a big screen behind the band, the most fascinating images flashed forward as DT hammered out the hits! We’ve got photos of a few of them at the end of this post. The images, standing alone, would be worth seeing, but the way in which they were arranged to connect with the music was just fucking brilliant.

And one of the high points was seeing the band play and sing almost exactly in sync with the video of “Shadow In Our Blood” off the new album. It’s a cool song, and pretty damned impressive to watch, given that DT couldn’t see the video behind them, but we could.

As of today, Dark Tranquillity has one show left (in L.A.) on this North American tour before heading off for a range of dates in Central and South America. Our metalhead brothers and sisters to the south have got a lot to look forward to.

And now here are some of our better photos of this show.

BLOOD AND THUNDER

MUTINY WITHIN

THREAT SIGNAL

DARK TRANQUILLITY

Two nights ago, one of my NCS collaborators (Alexis) and I hit Studio Seven in Seattle for Dark Tranquillity’s headlining We Are the Void Tour. Along with Threat Signal and Mutiny Within, the night also featured an opening performance by a Seattle band called Blood and Thunder. We’ll be posting our review of the entire show tomorrow, but we decided it was time to focus on Blood and Thunder in a way that the typical format of our concert reviews doesn’t really allow.

The two main draws for us at this show were, of course, Dark Tranquillity (who were cosmically awesome) — and the band we’re writing about today. We’d seen them for the first time a month ago when they opened for The Finnish Metal Tour on its Seattle stop (reviewed by us here), and we were super-impressed. Now that we’ve had the chance to see and hear them a second time, we’re even more blown away.

The local Seattle metal scene has a growing number of talented bands that we predict you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the near future, but Blood and Thunder may just be the best un-signed extreme metal band in Seattle.

We spent time talking with some of the guys after their set at Studio Seven. In addition to being superb songwriters and musicians, they’re as nice a bunch of metalheads as you could want to meet, and they were patient enough to pose for some photos outside the venue (like the one above and a few more after the jump). But they’re also dead serious and very intelligent in the way they’re going about trying to make a name for themselves in this overcrowded niche of music. It was an eye-opening conversation for us.

(Continue reading after the jump for our report on that conversation, our review of Blood and Thunder’s set, and a big batch of our barely tolerable concert photos of this band in action . . .)

CONCERT REVIEW

First things first: the music. From a 10,000-foot level, Blood and Thunder plays modern melodic death metal. But that’s really just the starting point. In addition to delivering powerful, head-snapping grooves and tremendously memorable melodic themes, the songs (as played live) include infectious instrumental jams that are technically sophisticated and just carry you away like an irresistible current.

It’s hard to overstate how technically capable each of these guys is — Ryan Yancey on drums (he’s also the lead vocalist), the amazing Billy Keller and Jeff Weaver on guitars, keyboardist James Furrow, and Nick Hughes on bass. They play with tremendous command and confidence, and the instrumental work is both inventive and as tight as a vacuum seal.

Lots of young musicians out there have developed their talents to the point of technical competence, or even brilliance, but what’s rare is to see technical chops combined at such an early stage of things with real songwriting talent. All the songs Blood and Thunder played in their set were written for a forthcoming album, and they’re all really original, distinctive, and memorable. We were particularly taken with one called “Children of the Sand”.

Plus, the band is just a shitload of fun to watch, and the enthusiastic Studio Seven crowd really got into their set. It was a real let-down when it had to end.

But the upside was that Alexis and I got the chance to talk at length with members of the band (mainly Ryan Yancey and Nick Hughes) after the set ended and during breaks between the other bands’ performances as the night progressed.

INTERVIEW

The guys in Blood and Thunder seem to get along well with each other, and they’re clearly having a lot of fun with their music. But they’re also dead serious about their ambitions and their music, and they’ve got a carefully considered game plan for taking their collaboration to the next level.

As frenetic ringleader Ryan Yancey described it, the starting point was to find band members who not only were very talented musicians, but also people who wouldn’t let their egos get in the way of dedication to excellence. (Humorously, Ryan explained that he decided to do the vocals himself, in addition to playing drums, to avoid the narcissism and drama of working with stand-alone vocalists.)

The band is also dedicated to creating their own well-executed product, paid for out of their own pockets, so that when the time comes to hunt seriously for a label, they’ll have a finished package of music and artwork ready to deliver. They’re hoping (and it makes sense) that this will make those label doors easier to open.

But for that scheme to work, the band needs capable professional help with the studio work and the mixing — and that’s proven to be a frustrating hurdle. They’ve already spent some fairly serious money and a lot of time tracking all the songs for a debut album — only to be thoroughly disappointed with the sound quality and the mix produced by the pro they hired to do it.

By this point, the band had already written 4 new songs for yet another album (which they describe as an even more technical approach to what they’re doing now), yet they realized it would be counterproductive to release the previous album’s worth of material in a form they couldn’t be completely proud of. So, while continuing to work on new music, they’ve engaged yet another engineer to re-record some of the tracks (including Ryan’s vocals) and re-mix the music in an effort to achieve the sound they’re after.

It’s been a frustratingly fucked-up turn of events for them, but the band is pushing ahead with this plan, and we hope it turns out right in the end.

It’s definitely the smart thing to do — because the one recorded song from the forthcoming album that’s up on the band’s MySpace page is a pale reflection of the way that song sounds live (the other songs streaming on that page are from an earlier EP). If these dudes can eventually manage to capture in digital form the kind of performance they consistently deliver on stage, then we have little doubt they’ll find the kind of label support they’re after.

In the meantime, Blood and Thunder is continuing to play live shows as often as they can — and we’re going to continue watching them as often as we can. Here are a few more of the photos we took when we cajoled the band into posing for us, plus a batch of shots we took of their set at Studio Seven on May 28:

Job For A Cowboy, Whitechapel, Cattle Decapitation, Revocation, and I Declare War hit Seattle hard on JFAC’s current Ruination tour on the night of May 18 at El Corazon. All three of your NCS collaborators turned out for the carnage and we file this somewhat incomplete report, along with a somewhat incomplete batch of our half-assed photos (be sure to scroll to the end of the review to see those).

Somewhat incomplete, because we had to leave before JFAC’s set. Maybe if we were being paid to run this site, we’d have stayed to the bitter end, but the people who actually do pay us were expecting our asses to show up on time early the next morning. Life is full of fucking compromises, isn’t it?.

I DECLARE WAR

Well, what can we say? It’s just so fucking cool to see our local boys making good. As we reported here back in March, IDW has signed with Artery Recordings and has a new album (Malevolence) due out on June 8, with two of the songs currently streaming on their MySpace page. They played some dates earlier this month in California with Whitechapel and Son of Aurelius, and next month they start a nationwide tour with Molotov Solution, Dr. Acula, and Monsters.

But this night was a show for the home folks — something of a coming-out since the news of their label-signing, and man, did the home folks turn out. El Corazon was packed to the gills in time for the first chord of IDW’s first song, and they showed these hard-working, hard-playing dudes a lotta love.  (more after the jump . . .)

IDW whipped the crowd into a moshpit frenzy with their uber-brutal brand of deathcore, featuring the super-low gutturals of Jon Huber (who has himself left bits and pieces of his body in moshpits throughout the Northwest — and did it again last night when Whitechapel took the stage). IDW’s self-confidence on stage has grown tremendously since we first saw them play more than two years ago, and they put on a killer set full of primal power and head-crushing groove. We wish them the best with the new album and the big tour about to start.

REVOCATION

We last saw these guys in Seattle on January 26 as part of the Metal As Art tour (and wrote about that experience here). They blew us away then, but that was just a warm-up for the jaw-dropping performance we saw at this show.

We’ve pretty well decided that this band is unclassifiable. They serve up a big dose of death-metal-infused thrash, but at the same time the instrumentation is so technically complex that it also appeals to died-in-the-wool math-metal nerds (like us).

All four of these guys are technically superb, and what’s amazing is to watch how flawlessly and in-sync they execute on stage while playing like super-charged bats out of hell. Think of being stuffed inside a child’s top, which is then set spinning at a zillion rpm’s and struck repeatedly by lightning bolts. That’s kind of what it was like being in the audience while Revocation tore up El Corazon on May 18.

As good as all four of these dudes are, we’ve got to say again that Dave Davidson’s shredding puts him in some very rarified air. He’s not just blazingly fast and inventive, he plays with tremendous passion and feel.  If these guys played here once a month, we’d turn out every damned time.

CATTLE DECAPITATION

We’ve admired from afar this San Diego foursome’s uncompromising dedication to their principles — and to the brutal way they convey it in their music and album art. But until last night, we’d never seen them mop up the floor with their live music. What a complete mind-fuck this set was!

Hyper-technical grind played with the speed of a whipping centrifuge. No discernible melodies. Very few rhythms or tempos that lasted for more than about 5 seconds before shifting to something else. Each instrumentalist going berserk on their instruments at a blinding pace, and yet somehow in complete sync with each other.

There’s no telling how many million hours of practice and performance enabled these dudes to pull this shit off, but it was an awesome (if bizarre) spectacle to watch.

And speaking of bizarre, vocalist Travis Ryan looked (and shrieked) like he was going through one protracted, non-stop seizure, which included him periodically sticking his fingers into his mouth, rolling his eyes, and thrashing about like he had electrodes shoved up where the sun don’t shine.  The dude’s vocals are also insane. It was riveting to see, and hear.

Cattle Decapitation drove the already frenzied crowd into an even more intense frenzy and elicited a thunderously enthusiastic reception.

WHITECHAPEL

We’ve seen these deathcore titans before, but they just keep stepping up their game. Such a huge difference between their first stop in Seattle on a national tour two years ago and the jolting performance this week. They’re in complete command now, and they put on a pummeling live show.

The band’s unusual three-guitar attack delivers serious blunt-force trauma in a live setting. It’s all about rhythm and visceral power and roof-collapsing breakdowns and Phil Bozeman’s gut-rumbling gutturals and hair-raising shrieks. Just impossible not to get into it, particularly when almost the entire, densely packed floor was in constant motion from start to finish. Somehow, there was even enough room to manage a wall of death before the set ended.

Whitechapel has a new album (A New Era of Corruption) scheduled for release on June 8 via Metal Blade, but their El Corazon set was mainly a selection of songs from their previous releases, Somatic Defilement and This Is Exile. The crowd knew those songs well, screamed along with Bozeman, and was ready for every tempo shift and breakdown with mass physical action.

After Whitechapel’s set ended, capping off the equally wild performances that preceded them, we felt like we’d been cooking all day in a Dutch oven bubbling with moshpit juices. The place was just hot as hell — and it’s not even June in Seattle.

JOB FOR A COWBOY

Massive fail by us! We had to leave before their set started. No slight intended to JFAC. Like I said at the beginning, life is just full of fucking compromises, and my cohorts and I just couldn’t make this as late a night as we would have wished in a perfect world.

********

Bottom line: this is a tour that’s definitely worth catching up to if you have the chance.  And watch out for that Molotov Solution – I Declare War tour if it comes to your neck of the woods. Those tour dates can be found here.

And now, here are some more photos from the show.  Sorry to say, they’re even more half-assed than usual because someone decided to keep the stage pretty dark for most of each set, with big white spotlights directed instead onto the crowd. For amateurs like us, that really makes it tough to get decent exposures for stage shots from a distance. Oh well, fuck our excuses, here are the pictures:

I DECLARE WAR

REVOCATION

CATTLE DECAPITATION

WHITECHAPEL

On the night of April 21, The Finnish Metal Tour 2010 played Seattle’s El Corazon, and two of your NCS Co-Authors were there to bear witness and file this report — along with a big batch of our amateurish photos.

With the likes of Finntroll, Moonsorrow, and Swallow the Sun on the bill, we expected nothing less than excellence on stage, and that’s what we got. Which brings to mind a question we’ve had before:

How does a country with only 5.4 million people produce so many awesome metal bands? We still don’t know the answer. But whatever the explanation, here’s hoping it doesn’t stop. Judging by the reaction of the full house at El Corazon, we’re not alone in feeling that way.

Before the procession of Finns took the stage, two local bands got the growing crowd nice and warmed up.

BLOOD AND THUNDER

This five-piece Seattle band plays Gothenburg-flavored, melodic death metal, driven at a galloping pace by some flashy keyboard and guitar work. They’ve got some good song-writing chops, too. The songs were memorable, and we’ve been drawn to the band’s MySpace page to listen again.

They’re one of those rare bands whose lead vocalist is the guy behind the drum kit, and his evil, death-metal vocals make a nice contrast with the memorable melodies. We were told that the band has finished tracking a debut album, to follow an EP released last year. We definitely want to hear it. A strong start to the night!  (our concert notes continue after the jump, plus lots of photos at the end . . .)

7 HORNS 7 EYES

This was the third time we’d seen these dudes this year as local support for a national tour, and they continue to impress in a big way. Every time we hear them, we adjust the description of their music, but we think we’ve just about got it down now: technical, somewhat blackened, melodic mathcore progressive death metal. Got that?

This is music you can get lost in just as much as you can bang your head to it. It’s a creative blend of styles that works really well, and their live playing continues to be sharp as tacks. We’re hungry for the album they’ve got in the works.

SWALLOW THE SUN

Alexis has been singing the praises of this band since the last time she saw them live, but the experience was a first for me. Man, was she right!

Anyone who’s heard the band’s albums knows that they have a talent for melding doom and death metal into a concoction that is by turns mesmerizing, beautiful, and brutal. And they bring all of that to the stage — meticulous playing that creates an array of shifting moods, and is shitloads of fun to watch. They sure has hell had the crowd at El Corazon in a trance, broken only by the wildly enthusiastic response as each song ended.

If you have the chance to see this band in the flesh, don’t pass it up. It’s the kind of performance that sticks with you.

MOONSORROW

This is another band Alexis had seen before (and raved about), but it was another first for me. And again, I was really fucking impressed!

Moonsorrow has been around since 1995, and their musical style has shifted over time, but it has always been distinctive. Stylistically, the songs combine black metal, death metal, and pagan metal, with keyboard-generated sounds of folk instruments. The result is a galloping fusion of neck-snapping fun, and the crowd response was boisterously enthusiastic.

These dudes bound around the stage with hair flying and heads banging, and they are a hoot to watch. They played a long set, and no one wanted it to end.

FINNTROLL

Finntroll also combines elements of black-, death-, and folk-metal, but to my ears at least, the sound has a more pronounced black-metal influence than in Moonsorrow’s case. It just sounds more evil. The combination of that strain of grim nastiness (particularly in the vocals) with the bouncing rhythms of folk metal and hammering death-metal riffs is striking and, as it turns out, really infectious.

Though the hour was late, the crowd at El Corazon stayed wholly into this performance, and it was another one that will stick in the memory a long time.

And now, more photos.  Lots more.

BLOOD AND THUNDER

7 HORNS 7 EYES

SWALLOW THE SUN

MOONSORROW

FINNTROLL

We got caught in a temporal vise. On one side was The Finnish Metal Tour 2010 at El Corazon in Seattle last night. Two of your NCS Co-Authors hit that up, and man, was it awesome! Finntroll (pictured above in one of our photos from last night), Moonsorrow, Swallow the Sun, and two very good local bands (7 Horns 7 Eyes and Blood and Thunder).

Those Finns don’t do half-measures. They all played long and late. We’re not complaining — but let’s just say it was the wee hours of the morning before we hit the rack. That’s one side of the temporal vise. And on the other side? The fucking day job. And the time in between the two just got squeezed down into a wafer-thin layer of almost nothingness. Certainly not enough time to finish messing with all the photos we took or to write our reactions to what we saw and heard.

So, to tide you over until tomorrow, when we can post our review and a batch of photos, we’re doing this: After the jump, we’ll post one photo from each of the Finnish band’s sets last night plus one album track to stream of a song from each of those sets. So, you’ll get songs from Swallow the Sun, Moonsorrow, and Finntroll to hear as you gaze at the photos — and imagine just how ridiculously good this concert was.  (all that, after the jump . . .)

SWALLOW THE SUN

And here’s one of the songs Swallow the Sun played last night:

Swallow the Sun: Swallow (Horror Pt.1)

MOONSORROW

And here’s one of the songs Moonsorrow played last night:

Moonsorrow: Aurinko Ja Kuu

FINNTROLL

And finally, here’s a song Finntroll played last night.  See you tomorrow.

Finntroll: Solsagan