Archive for the ‘Metal’ Category
At CMJ, No Fast Track to Fame, but Plenty of IRLing
Salome, one of the few metal bands that performed at this year’s CMJ.
For D.C. bands, the takeaway from CMJ seems to have been this: It will not pluck you from obscurity, but it can’t hurt. Also: Don’t believe the hype.
“The myth that you can land the perfect agent or manager at a place like that—I don’t think it pays attention to the reality that you’ve been talking to that person for seven months already,” said Jesse Elliott, whose polymathic alt-country band These United States played a handful of shows during this year’s College Music Journal Music Marathon. The annual industry gathering featured over 1,000 artists, close to 100 venues, and around a dozen acts from the D.C. area.
Elliott’s got a point: Most of the young bands I heard chatter about during the festival—like Florida’s Surfer Blood, New York’s Freelance Whales, and London’s Golden Silvers and Mumford and Sons—had recording contracts, significant blog buzz, or both going in, not to mention full management teams in place. These are not bands whose success lives or dies according to an industry festival.
“Most of the bands at these festivals are already signed,” wrote Todd Hyman, who runs the District-based labels Carpark and Paw Tracks and hosted CMJ showcases for both, in an e-mail. “Though this year there seemed to be a preponderance of unsigned blog bands. Seems folks were complaining about that.”
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Photos: Om @ DC9
Al Cisneros got a haircut, Chris Hakius morphed into Emil Amos (pictured above), and Robert Lowe of Lichens sat in on guitar, keys, and percussion. Om is very different now than they were when they last played D.C. Some growing pains were evident as the sound was rough and some of the pieces seemed a little sloppy. Still, with Cisneros staring wide-eyed at nothing while slamming his palm against his bass and Amos bashing the skins as gleefully as Hakius used to, it’s hard not to be transfixed by this band.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
Photos: Hanzel und Gretyl @ Jaxx
New York’s Hanzel und Gretyl are a thoroughly ridiculous band in music, lyric (their latest big hit? “Fukken Uber Death Party”), and imagery. Luckily, they know it, and they don’t take themselves seriously at all. As a result, a show that would just be utterly laughable is, well, still laughable, but also big fun.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
Photos: In Flames @ 9:30 Club
What a difference a year makes: last December, Swedish death metal icons In Flames were blown off the stage by their opening band (Gojira) in Baltimore; last May, North Carolinian prog-metallers Between the Buried and Me played to a disinterested audience of Dream Theater fans at DAR Constitution Hall. On Monday at a packed 9:30 Club, BTBAM satisfied a crowd full of fans screaming, “You guys should headline this tour!” while In Flames more than matched BTBAM, with exponentially more energy than they had at that Baltimore show last winter.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
Photos: Sunn O))) @ Sonar
Categorizing Sunn O))) as drone/doom metal is only really appropriate when the duo are at the peak of their Earth-tribute mode. This was very much in evidence last night at Sonar, where at least half the band’s 90-minute set was more like avant-garde noise played really, really loud. Sunn O))) can be a bit inscrutable, but their live show is a beast of glacial proportions: fog so thick one can barely see fellow audience members, much less the performers on stage; hellish red light outlining black-robed band members; and, of course, so much sound that it is a physical presence in the room.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
Salome, Batillus and Hull Kick Off September Tour Tonight
That’s three pretty kick-ass doom metal bands, all in one place. We’ve spilled a fair amount of digital ink about NoVA’s Salome (pictured above); today they start their first-ever proper tour, a few weeks after releasing the big news that they have been signed to the excellent experimental metal label Profound Lore (also home to bands like Alcest, Nadja, Krallice etc). When I spoke to the band a month or so ago, they said they were planning to take a break from live shows after this tour and begin recording their next album.
Salome are fantastic but Hull and Batillus are nothing to sneeze at either. You can download the latter’s EP for free and see for yourself, or just catch all three bands live – they’ll be in Baltimore tomorrow night at Talking Head, and then at College Park’s Marblehaus (3738 Marlbrough Way, College Park, MD) on Saturday night.
Full tour dates after the jump.
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Study Finds Metal Soothes Monkeys
If you want to mellow out a monkey, play him some Metallica.
That’s the surprising result of a new study by Charles Snowdon, a
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor. The researchers played clips of music— including Metallica’s
“Of Wolf and Man,” Nine Inch Nails’, “The Fragile,” Tool’s “The
Grudge,” and Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”—for cotton-top tamarins.
Check Out the Deciblog Scream-Off
According to one Nick Green, “Screamo bands covering Top 40 songs [is a] full blown epidemic.” He’s right: Lil Wayne. The Fray. The Postal Service. The Knack, for Christ’s sake (personally, I love that last one–it’s good background music for shot-gunning 16-ounce Natty Lights). In an ongoing special over at Decibel’s Deciblog, contributors put 16 screamo covers head to head in what will go down in history as the greatest Mallcore bracket ever made.
In the opening salvo, I played Drop Dead, Gorgeous‘ cover of “Swing” against I Set My Friends On Fire’s (pictured above) cover of “Crank Dat Soulja Boy.” In the same post, Axl Rosenberg of Metalsucks (featured in Amanda Hess’ column this week) measured Brokencyde’s cover of Flo Rida’s “Low” against A Static Lullaby’s cover of Britney Spears‘ “Toxic.”
New brackets will be posted throughout this and next week (today’s post features a screamo cover of Santana’s “Smooth” so insipid that I spread the mustard in my mouth), so check back often!
Dethklok and Mastodon Touring 34 Cities
Not only is Dethklok getting its own video game, but Brendan Small’s once-imaginary band has somehow managed to arrange a 7-week tour with Mastodon, the most popular metal act to come out of Atlanta and Metallica’s current tour opener. Mastodon’s Crack the Skye hit the streets in March of this year, and Dethklok’s Dethalbum II drops Sept. 8.
High on Fire and Converge will open the 34 shows–one of which will be at GMU’s Patriot Center on Oct. 31.
Electronic Arts is sponsoring the tour (which is sort of odd if you consider the new Dethklok video game is a Konami product), thus every concert will have console stations where audience members can try out Brutal Legend, EA’s new video game featuring voiceover work by Jack Black.
More deets after the jump.
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Photos: Fuck the Facts @ Talking Head
Canada’s Fuck the Facts are often pigeonholed as grindcore, but last year’s Disgorge Mexico showed the trio blowing up genre conventions and exploring sounds all their own. At their show last night in Baltimore, their setlist drew mainly from that album, bringing much-needed freshness to a show which to that point had been dominated by fairly cookie-cutter metalcore.
Fuck the Facts circa 2009 take the manic intensity of grindcore and tone it down a bit by throwing in all sorts of unexpected influences: slow, heavy sludge riffs, the occasional atmospherics, jazzy breaks, stoner-rock grooves, and full-on noise. The mastermind is guitarist Topon Das, but vocalist Mel Mongeon gets all the attention: while perhaps not the most dynamic of vocalists, her growls are incredibly harsh and fit the music perfectly, and her presence as a frontwoman is impressive to say the least, stalking around the stage looking like she was ready to explode into the crowd at any second. (Last night, she never did, but I’d guess that at better-attended shows the stage is not sufficient to contain her intensity.)
The biggest concession to grindcore convention that Fuck the Facts made was that they played an extremely short set, less than 30 minutes in total. Better too short than too long, as Mongeon intimated afterwards, but with metal this progressive and diverse, I could have done with much, much more.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
EDIT: Metal Injection has posted three videos from this show, with great sound quality.
