Doom metal supergroup Shrinebuilder played their second show ever on at club stage at Sonar in Baltimore last Friday night to a packed house. They didn’t disappoint: the songs from the album came off more powerful live, and some bits of new material sounded intriguing as well. As far as supergroups go, this one’s for real.

More photos (and a setlist) after the jump and at the full gallery.

Full gallery here.

The 9:30 Club hosted a local-ish metal blowout on Thursday: Lamb of God (Richmond), Darkest Hour (D.C.), Periphery (Bethesda) and This or the Apocalypse (Lancaster, PA). The seriously high-energy performances were matched by one of the most active, enthusiastic crowds I’ve ever seen at a D.C. show.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Darkest Hour:

Periphery:

This or the Apocalypse:

Full gallery here.

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.”

Like many of the D.C. bands who played the festival, Hyman questioned CMJ’s usefulness. “CMJ used to be really influential 15-20 years ago,” he wrote. “College radio’s influence has waned with the rise of the Internet. [Austin's South by Southwest] seems to be the main festival these days. I suppose CMJ benefits college radio music directors the most. And now bloggers.” Nevertheless, Hyman’s labels have hosted CMJ showcases several times since 2000, and he estimated he’s attended the festival 13 times.

When you cast aside the make-you-or-break-you narrative, though, there are subtle benefits to CMJ, bands said. “Though everyone likes to fantasize about big crowds and label offers, I think realistically we just wanted to play for a few new people at a new venue and to add CMJ to our collective resume,” wrote Nate Frey, whose band Last Tide played a set at the Brooklyn venue Littlefield, in an e-mail.

The Annandale, Va.-based doom-metal band Salome performed at one of CMJ’s only metal showcases, which Relapse Records sponsored. The band signed to Profound Lore Records over the summer, and said it sees CMJ the way most bands do: as an opportunity for exposure. Rob Moore, the group’s guitarist, said that performing under the Relapse banner meant a large turnout, and that as much as the music industry has changed in recent years, labels remain important as brands and filters. “If I were just to record something and stick it on the Internet, the chances of somebody hearing it are next to none,” Moore said. “So you still need a record label or blogs or Web sites or something to guide your path.” CMJ, he said, can connect bands to all those things, even if it may not deliver a recording contract.

Following exposure comes networking. “You’re basically going to meet people and hope something good comes out of it,” says Patrick Kigongo, of Ra Ra Rasputin. “As long as bands realize that they’re not going to have some sort of miracle happen to them, they’ll have fun.” He said his band—which CMJ initially wait-listed but later asked to a join a showcase—met other artists and a label with whom it may release something soon, not to mention a dubious show promoter who didn’t carry business cards.

Elliott, of These United States, said he appreciates CMJ for its more serendipitous possibilities—like meeting a band whose music you admire, or scoring a short write-up on a New York Times blog. These United States also met up with a producer from a studio where it may record its next album, and took some time to check out the space.

Evan Brody, who helps run D.C.’s Underwater Peoples label even though he lives in New Jersey, said someone from the Mexican People Summer label came to one of his showcases, and that he even had a conversation with Ryan Schreiber, the founder of the influential review Web site Pitchfork. And he met some of the bloggers that helped Underwater Peoples become one of this year’s most-talked-about petri dishes for young bands. “I think it helped put a lot of faces to a lot of people who I’ve spoken to,” he said. “There was a lot of IRLing going on.”

Photo courtesy of Salome’s MySpace page.

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.

Om:

Six Organs of Admittance, who played a very nice all-acoustic set:

Lichens, an amazing opening set of nothing but looped vocals:

Full gallery here.

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.

Hanzel und Gretyl:

Dreams in Fear:

Dark Dissolve:

Burning Mercury:

Full gallery here.

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.

In Flames:

Between the Buried and Me:

3 Inches of Blood:

The Faceless:

Full gallery here.

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.

Eagle Twin, Sunn O)))’s labelmates on Southern Lord, opened:

Full gallery here.

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.

Sept. 10 – Kung Fu Necktie – Philadelphia, PA
Sept. 11 – Talking Head Club – Baltimore, MD
Sept. 12 – Marblehaus – College Park, MD
Sept. 14 – Bar None – Virginia Beach, VA
Sept. 15 – Volume 11 Tavern – Raleigh, NC
Sept. 16 – Live Wire Music Hall – Savannah, GA
Sept. 17 – 529 – Atlanta, GA
Sept. 18 – Little Hamilton Collective – Nashville, TN
Sept. 19 – Planet Caravan Festival – Asheville, NC (feat. Clutch, Pentagram, Wino, Yob, and more)
Sept. 20 – Bunk Space – Cincinnati, OH
Sept. 21 – Fubar – St. Louis, MO
Sept. 22 – Riot Room – Kansas City, MO
Sept. 23 – White Star Bar – Chicago, IL
Sept. 24 – Melody Inn – Indianapolis, IN
Sept. 25 – Cafe Bourbon Street – Columbus, OH
Sept. 26 – Krugs Place – Frederick, MD (Hull, Batillus only)
Sept. 27 – Union Pool – Brooklyn, NY (Hull, Batillus only)

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.

Humans generally find the Nine Inch Nails and Barber pieces to be calming, with their slow tempos and descending pitches, like sighs. The Tool and Metallica songs, in contrast, tend to make people feel excited, as a result of their faster tempos and machine-gun bursts of
notes.

The monkeys, however, barely responded to any of the pieces, though they did seem to calm down and relax a bit while listening to Metallica and Tool.

“I don’t have a good explanation for that,” says Snowdon. “They are usually very active animals, and their movement got minimal after they heard those two pieces.”

The practical upshot? Monkey keepers may want to play heavy metal rather than classical music to calm their colonies. However, they’d do even better if they played “monkey music” — pieces composed specifically for tamarins by study co-author David Teie, a University of Maryland cello instructor and member of the National Symphony Orchestra.

Teie mimicked the contours of tamarin calls and wrote songs that had a muchbigger effect on the animals’ behavior than human music did. One piece, with a slowly rising whistle-like melody, caused the monkeys to groom one another and engage in other leisurely, social activities. Another, with short, staccato notes, sent the animals into a frenzy of anxious behavior including scent marking and head shaking.

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!