As made clear in my 1998 and 2010 articles, the Washington Area Music Association (WAMA) largely views any suggestions regarding changing the Wammies nomination process, or the organization itself, as simply sour grapes, naïve, or an undemocratic attempt to impose someone’s else’s opinion. Write WAMA a check, become a member, and we’ll listen to your opinion on nominations, they say, while WAMA critics wonder why they would want to join an organization that ignores widely heralded musicians, has a history of embarassing mistakes, and dispenses juvenile insults (see the reactions to the two prior pieces) in response to criticism that is meant to be constructive.

WAMA board members have told me in the past that they on occasion consult "experts" to fill the nominations slot, rather than simply relying on the suggestions from members. My point continues to be that WAMA needs more experts, and that WAMA needs to do a better job making their organization useful and helpful and demonstrating that it cares about all styles of music. WAMA members may still not vote for expert-suggested names, but getting more such names on the ballot would at least be a start. I am not talking about substituting my own view; I mean consulting various participants in the area music scene, including critics, promoters, bloggers, and academics. WAMA needs these experts because, frankly, numerous musicians and others do not see the organization or its Wammies as being valuable, and therefore do not want to join and nominate artists themselves. The list of well-regarded artists not nominated under the current process for the Wammies is simply too extensive to be dismissed in the manner that WAMA partisans have done for 25 years.

(An aside: WAMA should  update its website, which contains a number of out-of-date items including a link to a list of D.C. venues that contains the long-since-closed Warehouse Next Door, Capital City Pavilion, and Ellington's on Eighth, but not various facilities that are open.)

As for this year’s ballot, the Wammies have ignored all metal bands, including Northern Virginia's Salome, a favorite of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the City Paper.  They have again neglected bluesy soul artists such as the Hardway Connection, Jim Bennett, and Little Margie.  The world music category contains virtually the same choices as last year while again overlooking Haitian band Rafrechi and all Ethiopian performers (despite this area including one of the largest Ethiopian populations in the U.S.).  Rapper Fat Trel may have the support of Wale and the Washington Post and the City Paper and be on the WKYS list of hot area hip-hop artists, but that's not enough to get nominated for a Wammie. The Latin list again contains no mariachi bands, including Mariachi Los Amigos, whose membership includes the Smithsonian’s Dan Sheehy, one of the organizers of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.  The Latin roster also omits again Zeniza, Orquesta Romana, and Orquesta La Leyenda. Roots and country guitarist Jim Stephanson’s Say Go album was recorded with members of NRBQ and made a WFMU DJ’s top 10 for the year, but WAMA did not mention it.  Electronica vocalist nominee Bob Mould moved to San Francisco in 2009, and electronica vocalist nominee Ultra Nate is based in Baltimore. Electronica DJ act Nadastrom is wrongly listed as a performing act while DJs Dubfire & Sharam are listed together, when they have rarely DJed together since releasing solo projects several years ago. Where are electronica act Bluebrain and D.C. rock bands like Title Tracks, True Womanhood, Imperial China, and Medications, which The Washington Post, City Paper, DCist, Brightest Young Things, and other local media hailed as top acts last year? Michael West and others can surely name more ignored jazz participants, but it's obvious to even a non-fanatic of jazz like me that veteran players such as Bobby Felder, Jacques Johnson, Sr., and Nasar Abadey deserved to be mentioned.

Sure, it's nice that artists such as Warner Williams, the What ? Band, Joe Falero, Wale, Lena Seikaly, and others have been nominated in various genre categories, but when the water glass is so empty year after year, it’s hard to appreciate the water that's there.

In City Lights: Fringe-favorite nudity! One photog's Harlem fixation! Continent-hopping memory lessons! Crab-claw roach clips! An angel-voiced Icelandic fellow! Cry-in-your-beer country! And the inimitable Man or Astro-Man?!!!?!?!?!!!!

Doom metal—that slow, sludgy, Black Sabbath-influenced brand of extreme metal—is nothing new to the D.C. area. Two of the originators of the genre—Saint Vitus and Pentagram —hail from Maryland and Virginia, respectively. Scott “Wino” Weinrich, who joined Saint Vitus in 1986 and is responsible for other major stoner and doom metal icons like The Obsessed and The Hidden Hand, is still active in the local scene.

So why are Northern Virgina upstart doom metallers Salome—drummer Aaron Deal, vocalist Kat Katz, and guitarist Rob Moore—getting so much ink in the metal world, not to mention fawning write-ups in The New York Times and on NPR Music? A cynic might argue it’s the novelty factor: Salome has no bassist and an unusual membership. Deal is the bearded, tattooed metalhead; Moore is clean-cut and bespectacled (although he performs live sans glasses, presumably because he's rather not donate them to the audience in a fit of head-banging); Katz is a petite blond, and a yoga instructor.

But it’s just as easy to argue that Salome is noteworthy for the trail it's blazing for the doom-metal genre. Deal and Katz started the band in 2006, and it has informal ties to many in the D.C. doom scene. But Deal doesn’t consider those folks to be a direct influence on Salome’s music. The band draws inspiration from outside the style: Deal cites D.C.-area metal bands like Darkest Hour and Clutch, but says Jawbox and Fugazi are favorites, as well. While these diverse influences may not have been entirely obvious on Salome’s crushingly heavy and very straightforward debut album (according to Deal, that one was mostly just the results of “us jamming and doing minor tweaks when we started playing together”), they're becoming clearer with the release of the trio’s new record, Terminal. It comes out tomorrow.

In contrast to the debut, intentional songwriting played a bigger role with Terminal, which still boasts the visceral strengths of that first album but contains an innovative spark that transcends the doom subgenre. Amid the style's signifiers—thick riffs and howling vocals anchored by methodical drumming—are all kinds of new things. The opening cut veers off in unexpected directions several times: short blasts of noise and fast-paced, almost grindcore-like passages are interspersed with the usual plodding riffs. Similarly, the title track starts off with an uptempo and very un-doomy guitar riff before kicking into the band’s more usual slower gear. And the 17-minute “The Accident of History” which feels much closer to the long-form noise of Merzbow than the assault riffs of Sabbath. The nexus between doom and noise isn’t new, of course—see Sunn O)))— but here it still feels different and exciting.

“The whole focus is to keep things interesting with minimal instrumentation,” Deal says. “I wanted to try to make Terminal simple with more under the surface as the songs and album unfold, simple but clever. Hopefully it worked.”

It works pretty well on the record, and given Salome’s increasing reputation for one of the most intense live shows in metal, it will probably work even better on stage.

It's true: This year's South by Southwest feels like it ended 48 months ago. I already briefly pondered the South by Southwest postmortem, which is surely its own codified form by now. It's several weeks later, but the content bomb that All Our Noise just dropped—which includes over a dozen videos the site's Denman C. Anderson shot during the Austin festival—is well worth perusing, particularly for its footage of D.C. acts. Included therein: performances by the Northern Virgininia metal act Salome, dance duo Nadastrom, Nouveau Riche DJs Starks and Nacey, rapper Tabi Bonney, and more. My favorite? The clip I've embedded above, in which D.C.'s Kid Congo Powers, a veteran of the Gun Club and the Cramps, delivers deep, dirty rock 'n' roll with his new band, the Pink Monkey Birds.

Some Tabi after the jump. Read the full All Our Noise post here.

Excessive volume was the name of the game at the Black Cat backstage on Monday night, where an impressive crowd gathered for a few hours of eardrum abuse courtesy of Jucifer and Salome. The two bands were wrapping up a minitour together, and they certainly went out with a bang.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Jucifer:

Salome:

A little end-of-tour shot of the two bands:

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.

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)

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.

Bloody Panda:

Salome:

Full gallery here.

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.