“Wasn’t he just here?” you might be thinking. Well, yes, but the last time famed free-jazzer Peter Brötzmann played the Velvet Lounge, just a few weeks ago, he wasn’t backed by a rhythm section straight out of the extreme metal world.

Full Blast sees Brötzmann in a trio with electric bassist Marino Pliakas and whirling dervish/drummer Michael Wertmüller. Pliakas and Wertmüller both indeed have metal backgrounds, and if you can imagine a grindcore band going full tilt with Brötzmann wailing mercilessly on top, you’ve got the right idea. Since I can’t make tonight’s show, I caught this trio last night at the Windup Space in Baltimore, and, just like two years ago at The Red Room, it was a show of epic proportions. Full Blast builds tension relentlessly, and while the music ebbs and flows, the overall feeling is of being swamped underneath an exhilirating wall of sound.

If Brötzmann and Wertmüller are obvious focal points, the crashing waves in this sea of noise – Brötzmann because he’s Brötzmann and Wertmüller because he is absolutely one of the most amazingly dextrous drummers I’ve had the pleasure of watching – Pliakas is the undertow: dangerous, unpredictable, rising with unexpected ferocity at various points in the music. Seeing the trio together in action is a revelatory experience, and this is pretty much mandatory if you’re a fan of free jazz, noise-rock or extreme music. And if you found Brötzmann solo a bit too much to handle, Full Blast is more accessible, even if simultaneously more extreme.

Full Blast plays at the Velvet Lounge tonight; PRV Trio and The Undisco Kidds are opening. Doors at 7:30, show at 9, $12, don’t miss it.

Check out some more photos from last night’s show after the jump. Full gallery here.

Read More “Don’t Miss Peter Brötzmann’s Full Blast Tonight” »

So that was fun. Festival organizers estimated that some 2,700 people attended this year’s (incredibly well-run) Maryland Deathfest. I missed the first day, but will post more about Saturday and Sunday of MDF VII later. For now, here are a few photos and my thoughts in superlative form, after the jump.

Read More “Quick & Dirty Recap: Maryland Deathfest VII” »

Maryland Deathfest is about to kick off its first day in a couple hours, but better late than never, right? I’ll be covering Saturday and Sunday, but for anyone still thinking about heading up to Baltimore (tickets are still available, but not many of them!), here is my absolutely non-comprehensive and subjective preview of select bands I want to see. Keep in mind that my knowledge of classic 90s death metal is limited, and I’m more into the modern grindcore and experimental stuff.

MDF takes place at Sonar, 407 East Saratoga St Baltimore, MD 21202, today through Sunday, on the main stage inside as well as an outdoor stage. Tickets will be available at the door for varying prices depending on the day.

FRIDAY (today!)

• Cattle Decapitation – outside – 6:35-7:10 – Pretty good modern grindcore. Their latest album throws some curveballs, including the inclusion of Jarboe and Grayceon cellist Jackie Perez-Gratz, but I still like their old stuff best (Karma Bloody Karma etc). Listen at Myspace.
• Mayhem – outside – 8:30-9:30 – Mayhem was at the center of the violent early-90s Norwegian black metal circus, with two original members murdered by other musicians in the scene. Somehow they’re still going and still scary. Expect fake human heads impaled on stakes onstage. Listen at Myspace.
• Cephalic Carnage – inside – 12:40-end of night – My favorite song of theirs is indicative: “Black Metal Sabbath,” a tongue-in-cheek spoof of black metal’s tremolo riffing and screeching vocals that then transforms into an equally tongue-in-cheek but totally awesome Sabbathy sludge riff. Listen at Myspace.

Check out my Saturday and Sunday picks after the jump. Photo above of Bolt Thrower (playing Saturday) courtesy their Myspace page.

Read More “What to See at Maryland Deathfest” »

Less than two weeks out from the festival’s kick-off on Friday, May 22, Maryland Deathfest organizers have announced that, in order to accommodate higher than expected ticket sales, the fest will have a stage set up outside Sonar, in addition to the Sonar main stage. As of today, tickets are available again for purchase but have gone fast in previous onsale intervals.

The running order for all 54 bands has also been announced. Cephalic Carnage headlines Friday, while, interestingly enough, a pair of black metal bands close out the night on Saturday and Sunday – Wolves in the Throne Room and Sigh, respectively. Check out the festival’s Myspace post for full running order details.

Yours truly will be covering Saturday and Sunday of the fest, so stay tuned for all the gory details (and photos).

Hard-rock/metal arena show up in Baltimore on Tuesday: Disturbed, Killswitch Engage, Lacuna Coil and Chimaira. No words for this one, just the photos, after the jump. I did get a chance to interview Lacuna Coil’s Cristina Scabbia before the show, though, the results of which I’ll be posting in the future.

There are also more of my photos over in this gallery.

Read More “Photos: Music as a Weapon IV Tour @ 1st Mariner Arena” »

Apparently I picked the worst time possible to take a long weekend and skip town, because for the experimental jazz/rock fan there is something awesome happening every night for the next four nights. Check it out:

• Thursday, April 16: Composer/arranger Ed Palermo will be conducting the U.S. Army Blues ensemble in a program comprised entirely of the music of Frank Zappa. (What.) This takes place at 7:30pm in Brueker Hall at Fort Myer – 400 McNair Road, Fort Myer, VA.
• Friday, April 17: Cuneiform Records artist Beat Circus (Myspace), a rock ensemble whose current lineup includes all kinds of strings and horns (including a tuba), will be at Orion Sound Studios south of Baltimore. Opening is Fern Knight, with whom I’m not familiar but who are described as a mix of “Krautrock, UK folk, and early baroque and renaissance music.” Cool. Orion is at 2903 Whittington Ave., Baltimore, MD. Show at 8pm.
• Saturday, April 18: The Tiptons Saxophone Quartet (Myspace), plus drummer, performing at Orion. This sax quartet has a diverse, fun repertoire that “ranges from New Orleans ’second-line’ to jazz, Afro-Cuban to Balkan, klezmer and beyond.” Show at 8pm.
• Sunday, April 19: Japan’s psychedelic rockers Acid Mothers Temple (Myspace) hit DC9. AMT seems to be constantly on tour, and their shows are semi-legendary for their stoned-out, hazy heaviness. Also, Japanese psych-rock is pretty much just reliably crazy. Show is at 9pm, Sonic Suicide Squad are opening.

Photo of Beat Circus courtesy their Myspace page.

This happened 10 days ago, but it’s worth a look back: cellist Erik Friedlander brought his “Broken Arm Trio” to An Die Musik in Baltimore. This trio—Friedlander on his fancy carbon-fiber cello, Trevor Dunn on upright bass, and Michael Sarin on drums—was, as Friedlander explained during the set, conceived as a sort of tribute to famed jazz bassist Oscar Pettiford, who broke his arm and was unable to play bass afterwards. Pettiford took up cello and played the instrument like a bass, inspiring Friedlander’s almost entirely pizzicato playing with this trio.

Friedlander has recorded in the past for Cryptogramophone Records, and his music is a perfect fit for that label’s genre-bending tendencies, although this trio is more clearly rooted in jazz than anything else I’ve heard from him. Friedlander’s jaunty plucking makes the music here upbeat and fun, though the rare moments when he bows his instrument (as in the sublime “Pearls”) stand out as particularly gorgeous, in no small part due to the contrast in sounds.

There was one hint of Friedlander’s history of collaboration with John Zorn, a piece that sounded exactly like one of Zorn’s more chaotic Masada compositions. “Jim Zipper” (I think that’s what it was) was a nice show of versatility from a group of musicians who individually have played with groups as diverse as Mr. Bungle and Alanis Morissette. Still, it was the exception to the rule: Friedlander’s vision with this trio is a narrow one, but when the execution is this good that’s not really anything to complain about.

Seems like a lot of interesting metal shows are hitting Baltimore this spring but not D.C. Case in point: The Acacia Strain at the Ottobar last Thursday. Although pigeonholed as metalcore, much to their chagrin, this band plays a brutal, complex brand of death metal that’s pretty far from the dumbed-down stuff that “metalcore” often makes one think of. It’s kind of hard to take seriously a frontman who says things like “this next song is about… killing… everyone!” but the live renditions of songs off The Acacia Strain’s latest album, Continent, were tremendous.

Headliners Bleeding Through, unlike The Acacia Strain, are metalcore through-and-through, although they have their own unique twist in the use of keyboards both for orchestration and the occasional clean piano run. I frankly thought they were pretty terrible until last year’s Declaration, which surprised the hell out of me by actually being fairly listenable. The vocal style still isn’t my bag, but like any good and well-practiced metal band, Bleeding Through are energetic performers and had folks stagediving and crowdsurfing with the kind of reckless abandon I’m beginning to associate with Ottobar crowds.

Maybe this is why all these great, young metal groups are bypassing D.C. these days: I have a hard time imagining a crowd at, for instance, the Black Cat (or any other D.C. rock/metal club) getting quite as worked up. That said, I now eagerly await fans at the upcoming Mastodon show at the 9:30 Club to prove me dead wrong.

In any case, visit the full gallery to see more of last Thursday’s mayhem (including openers As Blood Runs Black).

I don’t really have many true “favorites” when it comes to music, simply because there’s too much good stuff out there to single out particular bands or albums. That said, Despised Icon is far and away my favorite metalcore band. I’m only slowly coming around to the mixing of extreme metal and hardcore, but DI are basically an awesome death metal band who happen to use a bunch of “core” elements (gang vocals, breakdowns, pig squeals etc). They do it way better than any other metalcore band I’ve ever heard—their breakdowns in particular aren’t as predictable and extraneous as with most other bands of this style.

Sonar was the closest DI came to D.C. on their “Montreal Assault Tour,” which showcased four other metalcore bands from, you guessed it, Montreal. This was supposed to be a tour in support of a new DVD, but that DVD has been delayed and the dudes aren’t happy about it. In any case, of the four other bands, Neuraxis was some solid death metal and I also found Carnifex surprisingly enjoyable. But DI blew them all away, and it’s clear they haven’t lost a step despite the recent departure of guitarist Al Glassman.

More photos, including a few of each of the other bands on the tour, here.

Random fact: for a while last year after Swedish technical death metallers Meshuggah came out with their latest album, ObZen, I used the opening track, “Combustion,” to get myself out of bed every morning. It was perfect: a few seconds of quiet, rhythmic guitar as an initial alarm, before the full band kicks in for the real wake-up call. About a minute in, Jens Kidman enters with his harsh vocals, and I would always make sure I was up to turn it off before that. Loud crunching guitars I can handle in the morning, I guess, but not screaming Swedes. Anyway, the point is, I like Meshuggah. And if they’re enough to wake me up in less than 60 seconds, they must be pretty damn brutal.

Read More “Photos: Meshuggah and Cynic @ Recher Theatre” »