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.”

Read More “At CMJ, No Fast Track to Fame, but Plenty of IRLing” »

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.

Read More “Salome, Batillus and Hull Kick Off September Tour Tonight” »

Bloody Panda and Salome brought deafening volume levels to The Red and the Black’s tiny performance space last Thursday night. Bloody Panda (pictured above) is a six-piece from New York City, signed to the brilliant Profound Lore Records, whose recorded output is an intriguingly unconventional mix of glacial riffs and ethereal vocals. Their live show completely failed to connect with me, unfortunately, with the compositions seeming disjointed and several ideas dragged out for far longer than they deserved.

Salome, Virginia’s best doom metal band, probably need little introduction here. Thursday was their last D.C.-area show before kicking off a lengthy tour in September (with Hull and the absolutely fantastic Batillus) that the band still need help booking. Their set was tremendous as always, and the material seemed a bit more diverse than I’d noticed before, with long sections of droning feedback juxtaposed against much faster sections of near-blast-beat intensity.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Read More “Photos: Bloody Panda & Salome @ The Red and the Black” »

If you’re a metal fan, check out tonight’s show on H Street, which features three local-ish bands of varying stature in Misery Index, Drugs of Faith and Salome, plus Phoenix grindcore band Landmine Marathon. Should be an interesting mix of slow & heavy (Salome) and fast & brutal (everyone else). This show is a prelude to a big world tour that sees Misery Index hitting Canada, Japan, and a bunch of European summer festivals, in support of last year’s Traitors on Relapse Records.

While this is Misery Index’s show, it will also be a kind of informal release party for the new Agoraphobic Nosebleed record Agorapocalypse, which is out today. Half of ANb will be playing at this show—vocalist/bassist Richard Johnson plays guitar in Drugs of Faith, and vocalist Kat Katz does the screaming for Salome.

At the Rock & Roll Hotel, doors at 8:00, show at 8:30, $10 cover.

Photo of Misery Index above courtesy of their Myspace page.

This show was billed as “3 Generations of D.C. Stoner Doom,” which was a nice marketing gimmick and a pretty cool way to introduce old fans of Scott Weinrich’s various bands to a couple newer bands. If Wino (above) was the first generation, I’m solidly of the third, and as such I was at this show mostly to see Salome (below), the youngest, loudest, and most abrasive of the bunch by far. Wino and King Giant put on solid sets of melodic stoner rock, but Salome’s gloomy rumble is definitely much more up my alley. Melody? Who needs that?

So it was nice to see that all three bands were pretty well-received, and by the time Wino wrapped up his set the club was loosely filled on the ground floor with many apparently die-hard hometown fans. Not bad for a show that was thrown together completely at the last minute. And it was an early show, so the first generation could get to bed and the third could still go out and party. (I suppose in that respect I’m much less solidly of the third generation.)

Here’s a bunch of photos.

Maryland-based guitarist Scott “Wino” Weinrich is credited as one of the most influential figures in stoner rock and doom metal, having been on the scene for three decades and heading up bands like The Obsessed and Saint Vitus. He’s back with a solo album and a new band, as far as I can tell simply called “Wino,” making its live debut at the 9:30 Club tomorrow evening. It’s an early show – doors at 6, show at 7.

Worth getting there early, too, since Virginia doom metal titans Salome (who are making waves these days, having been picked up for the first installment of Pitchfork’s metal series in NYC, as well as the monstrous Scion Rock Fest in Atlanta) are opening alongside stoner rockers King Giant.

photo courtesy Earsplit PR

You haven’t had enough of the lists yet, have you? Good. Here’s one more quick one: my list of favorite shows of the year, mostly in D.C. but also ranging north to Baltimore and south to Charlottesville (links all lead to photos):

1. St. Vincent at Rock & Roll Hotel, February 26
2. Nels Cline Singers at the Paramount Theater, June 6
3. Tim Berne’s Bloodcount at An Die Musik, February 9
4. Amanda Palmer at the 9:30 Club, November 18
5. Wilco at Lyric Opera House, December 14
6. Salome at DC9, August 10
7. Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin at Blues Alley, March 3
8. Earth at Rock & Roll Hotel, May 4
9. Nobu Stowe at George Washington University, September 7
10. Evangelista at Velvet Lounge, April 16
11. Boris at the Black Cat, July 8
12. Škampa Quartet & Iva Bittová at the Library of Congress, April 11
13. Dälek at Rock & Roll Hotel, February 27
14. Kamelot at Jaxx, October 16
15. Woven Hand at Iota, October 17

Where 2007 was my love-affair year with free jazz, 2008 saw my affections turn to extreme metal in all its varied forms. The sad departure of Transparent Productions meant a dearth of interesting avant-garde jazz in the District, and I replaced concertgoing expeditions to Sangha (RIP) and Twins Jazz with rather different expeditions to places like Jaxx and various smaller venues booking the more underground kinds of metal. My passion for music tracks closely with what I’m seeing in the live setting, so it makes sense that my 2008 list is dominated by the heavy, evil stuff. (My friends—and especially housemates—didn’t appreciate this so much.)

Be it metal, jazz, electronic music, free improvisation, or whatever, I’ve been convinced for a few years now that, industry woes aside, we’re living in a renaissance period with fascinating new music being made at an unprecedented clip. Granted, I have absolutely no empirical basis for this claim, but I present the following 10 recordings as examples of the freshness of today’s music-making scene…

1. One With Filth, Crowpath (Willowtip)
Pundits can quibble over whether or not “avant-garde metal” is really avant-garde in any meaningful sense, but the latest album from Swedish band Crowpath is an undeniably experimental and edgy slab of death metal. Compared to the band’s two earlier releases, it’s downright catchy and accessible, striking a perfect balance between challenging and immediately rewarding, but it’s still impossibly punishing. “Thinking man’s metal” is an overused phrase and too often refers to dry exercises in technicality, but it’s a perfect term for this recording.

Crowpath, “Cleansed In Chlorine”:

2. Doombringer, Nasum (Relapse)
A more than welcome posthumous live release from these grindcore greats. Although Doombringer clocks in at a mere 23 minutes, the 16 tracks here are meatier than most albums twice the length or more. Brutal and unrelenting from start to finish, like getting punched in the face repeatedly, by a guy wearing spiked brass knuckles. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Nasum, “Inhale/Exhale”:

Read More “Music 2008: Alienate Your Friends” »