(Andy Synn witnessed the Derby, England stop of the Reborn of Death Tour and apparently was so skull-rattled by the experience that he thought he was at the movies.)
What a line-up, am I right? It’s like a 6-round pummelling before that final knock-out blow. Each band softening you up for another vicious beating by the next. So, still feeling a little punch drunk from the experience, how am I going to manage to review the show for you fine folks?
Through the works of one Mr Sylvester Stallone.
Chronologically speaking, Carceri are the Rocky Balboa (Rocky 6, for those not in the know) of the evening. Definitely the newest act on the block, with a large legacy to live up to. Thankfully, much like their filmic counterpart, they manage to take familiar elements and give them just enough of a modern shine to justify their position. Playing cuts from their new album The Good Must Suffer The Wicked, with a backdrop of dizzying, morbid imagery scrolling and warping behind them, the group deliver an electrifying blend of punchy, mechanical riffage, bone-rattling blast-beats and massive death growls that deftly bears up under the weight of their Oscar-winning legacy.
Unfortunately, the position of Rocky 5 is occupied by Cerebral Bore tonight, as their brain-mangling death-grind has all the familiar elements and hits all the expected story-beats, but somehow lacks the inherent character and heart in its delivery. The vocals are utterly monstrous, but the drums have an overly-triggered sound that robs them of their brutality, and the bass and guitar never fully lock in correctly. The actors are all present, but something about the story is lacking. Close to the end of the set, however, the band debut a new song that shows real promise, picking up the pace in time for the closing credits.
(DemiGodRaven checks in with his review of last Friday’s show in the Sacramento, California, area headlined by Conducting From the Grave and featuring a slew of other Sacramento bands, and his review is accompanied by lots of video.)
Marking the first time in a while that I’ve made the trip out to the Boardwalk in Orangevale, last Friday’s show was going to prove to be an interesting one. We had Sacramento hometown heroes Conducting From the Grave (it seems like every band opening for them holds them in some sort of reverence), who were going on a small headlining tour before they made the jump onto the monstrous All Shall Perish/Fleshgod Apocalypse and other-bands-that-have-floated-my-mind tour, playing with a bunch of scrappy local groups and Fallujah.
Unfortunately Fallujah couldn’t make it due to some difficulties and likely ongoing troubles stemming from their van situation, so another group out of my old hometown area of Hayward/San Leandro (according to their band profile) was brought in as a last minute replacement, making this a show consisting largely of a bunch of scrappy underdogs. John Abernathy of Conducting fame would find himself playing a double set that night as part of a new, semi-all-star group (in terms of the local scene) — a blackened death project known as Soma Ras.
I was initially worried that I would make it to the show late after some traffic horseshit on the way there since the show was supposed to start at 6:30 and I came barreling into the door at 6:48. And the place was empty.
(DemiGodRaven provides this review of the Testament-headlining show in Sacramento, CA, on Feb. 17. Except for a drag-ass job of posting by your humble editor, the interval between the show and the review would have only been one week.)
Two weekends ago kicked the everliving fuck out of me. I went to two shows over the span of two days and basically spent Sunday in a coma because of them. Saturday was a huge local band party at the lovely venue out here known as The Boardwalk, and while I would love to review that one, my weekend was so hectic and tired that to be honest with you, the whole experience feels like a fever dream.
I will admit that’s probably shortchanging the dudes in Bispora (whose first show it was), Journal, GBAA, and Slaughterbox, but I know that I will be presented with other chances to talk about those groups at length. All I can say for now is you should look them up, they’re all really good.
The picture that you see above is the reason why I found myself in such a state. Friday, February 17th, I flew solo to a show for the first time in a while and went and fucking saw Testament. If I had to sum up my position on Testament as a group, it would be that they have been one of the most consistent thrash bands out there to date. When rumors of a big thrash tour would begin circulating, I was the one asshole who was secretly hoping that Anthrax would drop off and Testament could take their slot, or that the promoters would at least put Exodus and Testament on the bill as a bigger Titans Of Thrash-style tour.
You can tell these guys are icons in their own right, so all I really would’ve been pushing for would be to pull out the fans who went to those Big Four shows because they thought Metallica’s Black Album and the ones that followed have been fucking masterpieces.
That said, there are advantages to Testament being a bit on the underrated side, and one of the big ones is that I got to see them up-close and fucking personal at Sacramento’s Ace Of Spades. That to me is fucking incredible, because even though the Testament crowd is now much, much older than it used to be, it still felt like I was part of the burgeoning Bay Area thrash movement . . . which I missed because a) I hadn’t been born yet, and b) by the time a lot of these bands were gaining steam or simplifying their stuff for radio, I was a whopping three.
(The METAL SUCKFEST that took place in NYC on Nov 4 and 5 was a milestone event — the first U.S. metal festival organized and co-sponsored by a metal blog, and Metal Sucks pulled together a fucktastic line-up to boot. So, NCS decided to document the event up-close and personal by sending two emissaries — NCS writer BadWolf and photographer Nicholas Vechery. They returned intact, and this is BadWolf’s report of the festival’s second day, along with Nick’s photos. We’ll have interviews to come in the days ahead.)
Photographer Nicholas Vechery and I returned for the second day of Suckfest even more hung over and disgruntled than on November 4th—we wanted to look and feel our best.
I learned about the sad passing of GWAR’s Cory Smoot earlier that day, so I was all frowns… until we walked into the Grammercy and found it bustling. Tickets to the second day must have outsold the first two-to-one.
What’s more, people seemed excited. No one is very visibly excited about anything in New York except exiting a subway train (especially the Green line, ugh!). A mass of goat-throwers chit-chatted, drank, acted like an honest-to-god community—something rare for me, the Midwestern Metalhead.
Community, people coming together—that’s what makes festivals amazing.
(The METAL SUCKFEST that took place in NYC on Nov 4 and 5 was a milestone event — the first U.S. metal festival organized and co-sponsored by a metal blog, and Metal Sucks pulled together a fucktastic line-up to boot. So, NCS decided to document the event up-close and personal by sending two emissaries — NCS writer BadWolf and photographer Nicholas Vechery. They returned intact, and this is BadWolf’s report of the festival’s first day, along with Nick’s photos. BadWolf’s Day Two report will be tomorrow, and we’ll have interviews to come after that.)
Blogs will control the entertainment industry within our lifetimes (if the industry lasts our lifetimes). TMZ will overtake Entertainment Tonight. In some ways, Pitchfork has already taken Rolling Stone’s place. Case in point: MetalSucks just threw the first (to my knowledge) blog-driven extreme music festival on US soil, Suckfest, and NCS was there to cover it.
On November 4, 2011, suckalos—yours truly included—flocked to the Grammercy Theater in Manhattan for seven hours of thrash. NCS photographer Nicholas Vechery and I rolled in sleep-deprived and sore after a 20+ hour bus trip from Ohio. The venue –the Grammercy Theater—was indeed a theater once and remains dark and sparse.
Initially, I thought the Grammercy would be too small to fit a decent crowd, but the first day was poorly attended. Attendees shouted “Occupy Grammercy!” between songs, but otherwise behaved themselves too well by my standards. New York headbangers seem more reluctant to mosh than when I lived in the Big Apple. I smelled a division between lineup and audience—the first day’s bands all shared a background in hardcore punk, but in general MetalSucks caters to a more technical/progressive metal loving audience. The lineup was strong, but perhaps suited for a more intimate venue. After all, who wants to see Magrudergrind behind a security barrier?
Audience aside, the first day’s bands exploded over the lower-east side with white-knuckle intensity.
(Stop the presses! Andy Synn attended Dimmu Borgir’s performance in Nottingham last night and he’s already delivered this concert review, plus two videos he filmed of the show. Further proof that, like killer whales during their first month of life, Andy does not sleep.)
“An Evening With Dimmu Borgir”, as this occasion was billed, saw the band performing two sets during the course of the evening. The first featured Enthrone Darkness Triumphant performed in its entirety, while the second, subsequent set, saw the group concentrate on its most recent quartet of albums for a more dynamically varied mix of material.
For the first two songs, “Mourning Palace” and “Spellbound (By The Devil)”, the guitars were annoyingly muted, resulting in a mix of heaving bass lines and rumbling drums which, although powerful, lacked much of the clarity and sharpened melody which the songs require to truly breathe their morbid magic.
Thankfully, the sound picked up just near the end of the second song, allowing “In Death’s Embrace” to spread its blackened wings with malevolent grace and majestic glory. With the sound levels thus balanced out and the guitars now slicing through the mix like razor-edged scalpels, the song provided an early high-point to the evening, the 6 members performing as one blasphemously tight unit to produce glorious swathes of blackened riffage and sweeping, evocative keyboard lines.
(Andy Synn was on hand when Devin Townsend played ULU in London on November 11, and he provides this report of the show. This was one of four DT shows in London last week, each one devoted to the performance of a single Devin Townsend Project album from start to finish.)
Surprisingly, the venue for tonight’s epic extravaganza (epstravaganza?) was smaller than I would have anticipated, however still a decent size, with a large stage, high ceiling and spacious standing room for the sold-out capacity crowd. With more than a few Ziltoid puppets (mine remained behind to guard my car against interlopers) already waving in the air, it fell to Manchester prog-rock quartet Amplifier to warm up the already very receptive crowd with their brand of Brit-rock Tool-esque musical expressionism. Indeed, the band clearly had a reasonable fan-base of their own in attendance, judging by the impressively loud and clear response they received from those gathered in the front rows.
However, tonight was really about one man, or one band, depending on where one draws the already blurred lines between the two entities. As the crowd finally swelled to its full, massive throng, we were treated to an array of comical images and video stills superimposing Devin’s distorted face onto a series of film posters and movie montages, which kept everyone entertained during the inevitable lull in musical activity as the stage was torn down and set back up again for the night’s headline act. As things began to take shape we were “treated” (inverted commas to imply sarcasm there folks) to the joys of Ziltoid Radio, playing all the most terrifying and chipmunk-esque pop trash that could be mustered to prime the already expectant crowd.
I just wanted to use my favorite word in a post title today. Actually, that’s only part of the reason for this. The other part is that I saw Chimaira last night, headlining a show in Seattle that included Impending Doom and Revocation. Chimaira played “Power Trip” and about 10 other songs.
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After full audio immersion in the music of those three bands, my neck muscles were so destroyed when I woke up this morning that I had to strap on the custom-designed NCS neck brace, the one with the heated gel packs on the inside and the drinking straw attached to a pouch of chilled Stoli.
Chimaira had the strobe lights flashing and the smoke machine pumping and Sean Z (Daath) on keyboards, carpet-bombing the crowd with more bass drops than I’ve ever heard before and growling backing vox, and it was fucking glorious. A packed crowd on the floor was in non-stop mosh mode, and the Chimaira dudes looked like they were having the time of their lives on stage. And speaking of glorious . . .
(This is Part 2 of a post by BadWolf reviewing the 2011 edition of OGREFEST in Lansing, Michigan. Check out Part 1 HERE.)
Here begin the veteran acts. Wastelander Guitarist/vocalist Xaphan dedicated their set to his 14-year-old daughter, who attentively watched from the side while wearing an Asking Alexandria tee shirt. Ah, the generation gap. She should be proud of her papa; his band is badass.
Wastelander plays to my personal weaknesses with their mixture of black metal, groovy thrash, D-beat/crust punk and just plain ballsy metal-rock with a lyrical focus on post-apocalyptic survival. They sonically recognize Motorhead as the inception of all extreme metal, and play music that would make Lemmy proud, with twists of Amebix, mid-period Bathory, early Venom and NWOBHM-y goodness sprinkled on top. They made me go ‘ooh!’ and headbang from the first second—as they always do.
Growled vocals, big chords, mechanical beats (they used to play with a drum machine) and hairy, sweaty swing made for a compelling forty-five minutes of hair flying. I cannot imagine anyone, be they kvlt-er, beardo, neo-thrasher, or ordinary metalhead, who is immune to the charms of Wastelander. Since then they’re released a split 7” with a band called Abigail. (Their 2010 debut album is Wardrive.)
(more after the jump)
(In this two-part post, which begins today and concludes tomorrow, BadWolf reviews the 2011 edition of OGREFEST in Lansing, Michigan, and we’ve got music for you from most of the bands whose performances he covers.)
[This article has been the absolute bane of my existence for six months. The weather messed with my car, I missed some bands while interviewing others, none of the photos turned out, half the interviews were unlistenable, and other variables (loss of employment, re-gaining employment, writing at InvisibleOranges) just fucked it for me.
That said, seeing as how I’m about to go to Suckfest (and have a blast!) I figured I would warm you readers up with another festival report, that for Lansing’s annual Ogrefest. I was going to put this article up at my personal blog, Midwestern Metalhead, but I spend so much time writing here and at IO that my personal project has fallen by the wayside. Therefore, this article is for you, dear NCS-ers!
Also, posting this article to a wider readership is my little way of apologizing for the unreasonable delay—it won’t happen again next year! Dave, Jim, this one’s for you guys!
And all of you strangers—come to Michigan. See Ogrefest. It will be the shit.]
Here’s the nitty-gritty: Lansing has the best underground metal scene in the US, IMO, and Ogrefest, curated by Satyrasis’ Dave Peterman, is that scene’s annual showcase. It’s held every year at Mac’s Bar and is always the show I anticipate most. At least one of these bands always ends up a personal favorite, and 2011 was no exception. On to the narrative!
