Morgirion with Discordia, Lustrum, and Grue [O'Brien's, Allston, 3/29/2013]

It had been, as I hiked in for this one, an even four months, exactly, since I had been out to a show.  Mostly, this is the fault of bands not touring in the holiday season, and then my own wussiness at driving in weather that might get me killed, but a decent part of it is just plain bad luck: I pulled a lot of on-call shifts in that span that happened to line up with tours, and many other gigs also came during the period where I was filling in for my boss and had to back up whoever was on-call even if it wasn't me.  Whatever the reason, it was warm enough, and my shift had ended earlier in the day, and IT WAS ABOUT GODDAMNED TIME TO SEE SOME GODDAMNED METAL.  I was a little concerned about being out of condition, but that turned out to not be an issue as I got across the bridges to O'Brien's with time to spare.  I got in, decompressed, got a beer, and caught up with some folks, and presently Grue was set up and ready to get going.

Grue [5.5/7]
Since the last time I'd seen them, Grue has replaced 50% of their lineup (apparently amicably, as Dave did show up later for the rest of the show), and also brought in some stage costumes reminiscent of Ashdautas or Wormphlegm.  The hoods and robes stayed on for the whole of the performance, a pretty impressive commitment in the face of steadily building heat, and camouflaged not only the band members but also the musical style to a certain degree.  When you see a two-man black metal combo in costumes these days, most people are going to be thinking third-wave, and while Grue did close that way, with an earlier piece, the bulk of the set was a lot more directly second-wave, driven by drums so single-mindedly focused on blastbeat attack as has been seldom heard since Blastbeats In The North.  This is regression in a good way, and while Grue continues to develop by sliding back in time, they haven't solidified their sound quite yet.  It's coming, though, and what's here in the process is still some really good music.

In the break I stood around outside for a while to try to equalize my temperature down, and also to avoid hocking plague spit on the floor inside.  I'd gotten the Con Crud the previous weekend from the hordes in town and on public transit for PAX, and the hiking around in the middle of the night for this one, as well as the several cans of beer on top of several bottles at work probably pushed my heal date out a while.  Whatever, worth it.

Lustrum [4.5/7]
I hadn't seen this band before, and they were a little under-described; as things went, apparently "sleaze metal" is a valid match for "Black Sabbath playing Show No Mercy".  Maybe this is the case, since (false revelation inc) I don't really listen to Midnight, but in this particular instance, it showed pretty clearly why this band is a side project of the members involved.  The riffs and composition here weren't really strong enough to carry the whole set, despite being cool in places, and restricting the instrumentation to one guitar and drums seemed to cut down on the range and density as well.  It was still decent, but that's about as far as it got.

It was probably in this break that I vented out a lot of stuff about Party.San, Russia, and other topics to Mike Kleptocracy and other surrounding persons; as noted a while back, I'm taking a pass on festivals this year in order to try not to get killed hanging around the Russian Far East, having gotten there from Finland.  The itinerary is not set in absolute stone yet, but I'm definitely going...and definitely not going to see Carcass, Impaled Nazarene, Obscura, Alcest, and Primordial in Schlotheim.  SO MAD.  (On a related note, if you know someone with long-term residence in northeast China, pass their info along, I may need it.)

Discordia [6/7]
Up from New York, Discordia presented an interesting contrast to Grue: rather than being a second-wave band that looks like a third-wave outfit, they were a third-wave band that looks legit like a second-wave or death-metal act.  Free of stereotypical hipster affectation, Discordia just blasted out a strong set of excellent music, obviously influenced by other developments in recent USBM, but never up its own ass about it and still consistently violent as well as stirringly harmonic.  They killed it as strongly as you could expect a touring band to, and if there was a disappointment at all on the night, it's that they didn't set out a merch table or anything.  Sure, it's a way back to NYC, but with a band this good, people will show their appreciation, and the gas to sit on 95/84/90 for three or four hours each way isn't free.  Should they get something out/reissued, or a damned bandcamp at least, definite support.

Morgirion set up, the first band with adequate light for pictures.

Morgirion [6/7]
In a smaller space than last time, Morgirion was no less ceaselessly impressive.  There were stretches where Connor's mic and bass seemed to drop mostly or entirely out of the mix, but this didn't hold the overall effect back much, and at this kind of show, you can get close enough to pick up a good bit of value just from unmiced yelling and raw pick attack.  As intimated, this set was flat awesome, getting up to the high mark laid down by Discordia and justifying the running order beyond just the logistics of getting people back to their respective home bases in some kind of normal order.  The crowd had run down a little by the end, but the band's spirit hadn't, continuing to pump the violence out right to the curfew.  All-around excellent.

OM NOM NOM NOM

It was, though, closer to one than to midnight when this thing broke up, and since I was still sick, I beat feet over the bridges back again.  On arriving at my car, though, I realized that my car key wasn't in its usual pocket....or any of the other ones, as far as I could tell.  After a brief freakout, I got my shit together and started doing a walkover, planning out various scenarios and recovery plans, trying to move slowly enough not to miss anything on either side of River Street, but fast enough to maybe get back to O'Brien's before the staff left, to see if anyone had found it on the floor while sweeping up or something.  Crossing over the river bridge, though, I had to adjust my vest, and remembered that there were pockets in the hoodie under there.  And yes, the key was still in the left one, exactly where I'd stowed it five hours before on getting out of the car.  I turned around, headed back, and mounted up a little after 1:30, feeling super wicked retarded.  I've got to do a lot better job at remembering where I put stuff; the gearlist for Russia is already pushing 100 discrete items, and that's before I do a gear-out, or account for stuff that may be picked up on the way.  Must do better.


That's a ways off, though, and the next metal show is not another four months away: tonight is Baliset, among a huge galaxy of good shows, even with Evil Army getting marooned somewhere west of Buffalo AGAIN, and then Absu early next week.  The circle must keep going on and on.

Hekseri with Obsidian Tongue, Noose, Deathgod Messiah, and Grue [O'Brien's, Allston, 8/31/2012]

I was a little later than anticipated getting out for this one, but due to typically hard hiking, even with my rig full of stuff to hand out locally, and typically late actual start (five bands, I was expecting 8:30, but the music didn't start till 9), I got in with time to spare and to cool down in the still-functioning, still not overwhelmed AC.  In this time I was able to get some stuff passed out to Larissa in the course of talking about, among other things, the upcoming Hekseri album (as soon as they can finish putting the recordings together and find a label that's not going to go bankrupt) and the chance that they might be playing out in Europe in support of it.  Not a whole lot of discussion, though; her priority was of course on keeping things going smoothly, and secondarily finding out where the hell Noose was, because they didn't make it up to the venue in time to take the first slot, letting it get shuffled up for...

Grue [5.5/7]
The step up from the last outing in this building is quite evident, showing the difference a month can make.  The fundamentals are still the same, but more refined, and with a stronger sense of original self from the band.  If the bark was still on the logs last time, this set saw those chunks of The Olden Domain and Mardraum sawed and hewn into blocks, strapped together with some more third-wave chords and Dave's fulminating death-influenced drumstyle, corners still rough in some places but definitely showing the plan of what this band is building towards.  If we have to use those buckets, Grue is still definitely a third-wave black metal band, but more than any other third-wave band in this area, they're drawing clear lines: "no," the music says, "we're not completely on board with what's been happening in this style lately, so just to be sure, we're going to go back to Dead As Dreams and the proggier end of the viking metal flowering and start from there."  Where they're going, and if they can catch OT in terms of overall effect, are still to be decided, but this is definitely a band worth watching.

Grue setting up.

Since DGM and Grue were mostly backlining out of a shared equipment pool (and things were running a couple minutes behind), this was a short set change, but still long enough to get a beer and peruse the merchdesks; Obsidian Tongue's buttons are a little big, but still decent enough to take one to fill out a fiver in the process of picking up some very cool patches.  This new printing process -- if it catches on; Hekseri also had patches in this line -- in combination with the return towards patched gear on the part of the audience, has the potential to be very, very cool for DIY bands, as the quality is a huge step up from stamping onto a roll of denim and hand-cutting shit, at what seemed to be a pretty marginal additional investment.

Deathgod Messiah [5.5/7]
Hekseri wasn't the only band making a rare return here; it had been a couple years since I saw DGM, partly due to bad luck on my part and partly due to lineup issues and members concentrating on other projects, but they made up for lost time in their typically explosive fashion.  There was a little more Obituary in the sound than I noticed before, but the basic parameters remain, and the resolute violence of their attack got the floor moving for the first time on "Sexual Violence".  Because this kind of gutter-born first-wave black-death is kind of inherently and violently opposed to any kind of transcendance, there may be a ceiling on their arbitrary-numbers rating relative to every other band in the world, but that ultimately doesn't matter to the experience of getting down front, banging like a maniac, and fully soaking up that feeling of relentless war against everything.  Killer.

Also, as before, DGM blacked up for the gig (the only band to do so), and reinforced a long-held personal conviction by positive example: if you're going to do corpsepaint, black shoepolish or you're a fucking false.  No mercy ever.

Marcus invokes hell for Deathgod Messiah -- but not dicks, yet, though those were also on offer later.

Here, Wren finally goddamned showed up, and I was able to hand him the merchpack I'd accumulated overseas.  As noted repeatedly, Party.San has an infinite appetite for DIY material -- and the sources feeding that hunger aint chopped liver either.  Mostly flyers, but still an original Death Agony CD, a copy of Violent Sun's demo, and G.U.C. #28, which will be of dubious utility outside of the CD, but was necessary to hand across regardless.

Noose [5/7]
Despite the fears that they might not show, Noose eventually did get in, and slotted themselves in here as soon as a slot became available.  Unfortunately, they didn't quite meet the standard of the first bands -- indicating why they were initially slotted to go on first -- and attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to cover for their relative lack of compositional prowess by turning up the volume.  Noose thoroughly overpowered the room withtheir sound, but eventually, you decide to plug up or stand further back, and what you get is, at this point, a largely formulaic third-wave black metal act that's making itself difficult to hear via feedback.  They had some cool lines, but ultimately not enough of them to stand out; at the end of the day 'loud' is the bread and butter of metalheads, and no amount of loud is enough loud to prevent us from eventually digging through and evaluating the music underneath.  Noose has some decent potential, but at this point, it's a lot more for the future than the present.

Sorry, no pictures; the lights were down, and since I don't use plugs, I had to be a decent distance back if I wanted any hope of hearing the last two bands.

In this break, I also did my Hekseri/Witchblood merch, and of course all in German.  Meg had been at Party.San, but didn't see me there, for the obvious reason that most of my infield time was spent skulling Totenmacher with various dudes from Germany and the Republic, and that my non-infield time was thoroughly consumed by Dosenfußball and getting up to no good with Müller.  (Report to come, seriously.)  I passed out some flyers in return, but probably to no effect; even Jena is a fair piece from Nürnberg, and Dresden, from that perspective, is almost in goddamned Poland.

Obsidian Tongue [6/7]
Material-wise, this set from OT had a lot of similarities to the last one in this building, and we still didn't get "It Dangles..." or "Distant, Residual", despite the band giving props to the older-styled violence of the balance of the bill by pulling a track off their tape demo.  There will be other shows, though, and this one was pretty damn killer, even if beset by occasional technical difficulties.  As Obsidian Tongue's been playing lately, this was a down outing, but that says more about how good this band's been lately than about their form on this date.  Even as such, ceaselessly cool, still transcendant.

A light in the darkness -- when bands are super popular, it's hard to stand close enough to get pics with stuff in the rest of the frame.

Since I had to stop drinking to dry out for the drive home, I took a  break outside here.  It's getting to the part of the year where Boston's no longer a smelting furnace, but it's still not exactly cool out, even at eleven at night.

Hekseri [6/7]
Meg's Ausseidlung has meant, of course, no gigs since PT109 last year, but this admittedly short set made up for lost time in pretty impressive fashion.  I'm not sure how much new stuff we got along with the classics and Celtic Frost covers, as the front was pretty goddamn turbulent (putting at least one pint glass on the floor, leading me to spend most of "Der Hexenhammer" and "Hekseri" sweeping with my boot soles), but new material is not strictly needed here.  All the audience was looking for was Hekseri, again, and that's exactly what we got, driven, focused, bloody-minded, and somewhat more technically adept than when they were playing out more regularly.  Additionally, Meg's split her bodhran parts out into a new pagan project, keeping the focus here thoroughly on true black fucking metal.  I'd rather have gotten more, but curfews are curfews, and under these conditions, it's good enough to still be able to get Hekseri locally, period.

Hekseri return.

Jerome and Josh, shadowed but not overlooked.  If you want pictures that actually have recognizable people in them, go to RTTP, this is for inaccurate words and occasional poorly-resolved visuals.

Whole band again, with marginally better light on Megan.

As noted, though, the set had to come to an end, and with the bar bellowing for last call, I beat feet for the bridges.  I dodged a scare on the highway -- the stretch by Jordan's in Reading had apparently turned into a Twisted Metal track -- and got home, but at goddamned 2 in the morning, in just enough time to go to sleep, snooze through the alarm, and not hike enough on Saturday before getting drunk watching bad EPL games.  Long weekend, it'll work out.

Obsidian Tongue with Neldorath, Vulkodlak, and Grue [O'Brien's, Allston, 7/28/2012]

Most of this Saturday was spent driving around various places picking up extra equipment for the coming tour; the weather was bright and clear as you'll get in a New England summer.  This done and a couple hours spent puttering around the house and cooking the remaining contents of the fridge, I didn't notice that by the time I needed to head in to Boston for the show, a torrential rain had blown up.  This made driving a little slower, but the roads on this route were at least large, wide, and well-maintained, which made it a little easier than the historical parallel....which actually isn't much of a parallel because this rain, while difficult, was not snorkel-bad.  Indeed, it had lightened up substantially by the time I got in to the city, stowed the car, and started in on the hiking portion.  The rain on the hike over kept things a little cooler, and also provided a decent dose of "also training"; I'd done hot weather with the pack strapped up, but in Germany in August, you're as likely to get torrential rain, so it was good to get some practice on wet roads.  Not all that much, though, because the distance to O'B's remains about as short as ever, and I still ended up one of the earlier patrons in the building.

Grue [5/7]
This was the first time that I'd seen Grue in person (well, on stage); this is a new two-man third-wave black metal combo from Dave of Summoning Hate/Untombed fame and Morgan from Unholy Goatfucker, and both that newness and the members' strong experience showed off here.  The execution was top-notch, but the songs, at least at this point, had a lot of the structural deficits that Obsidian Tongue had at first, which appears to be a kind of necessary teething process as guys accustomed to writing for what we usually think of as "full bands" get used to the restricted instrumentation.  The riffs in that material, though, in spite of the underfinished or occasionally disjointed way they stack together, holds out the promise that when those issues are resolved, Grue has a fighting chance of catching up to the headliners here.  Balanced neatly between violence and melancholy and subtly loaded with undertones and harmonics reminiscent of early Borknagar and turn-of-the-century Enslaved, Grue's music has a lot of the sublime about it, and while they're cool to listen to right now, there's the potential to be extremely impressive once these guys finish deciding how they need to arrange their writing for maximum effect.

A Grue in the light?  That's unpossible!

Set breaks at this gig consisted of three things happening in any order.  1) Get new beer.  2) Go outside to cool down.  3) Dave comes by and promises that he has Grue tapes for export.  I did eventually get said tapes at the end of the night, and wasn't planning on leaving without them, but Dave of course had other stuff to do and other people to hang with over the course of the night rather than making up export packs.

Vulkodlak [5.5/7]
After seeing the parade of dudes in NYDM vests going in and out carrying gear, it was a little surprising to see this band line up and start playing as only a two-piece.  Member absences are no rare thing in the underground, even when it comes to underground touring, but this turns out to be most of Vulkodlak, and despite being down to just drums and guitar (this was kind of a theme for the night) they managed to mostly carry off the material.  Their spiky death-tinged black metal wasn't the most diversified or original in the whole world, but they generated a good performance with what they had, pulled up in closing by a fast, violent, cover of Sodom's "Blasphemer".  Pretty good stuff; hopefully, they'll be back, and in greater numbers.

Vulkodlak committing "Rites of the Equinox".

I apologize to anyone (mostly Mike Kleptocracy, maybe also the Rev) who I provided with false information on this band.  This is not the same band as the Vukodlak who put out Darkest Autumn ten years ago, despite the practically identical spelling of an extremely uncommon word and the fact that they were touring with another NYDM band from Pennsylvania.  That other L is significant, and they are legit 100% from Alabama.  Support real hinterlands extreme metal (see also), not gimmick rednecks.

Neldoreth [4/7]
Neldoreth continued on with the two-member theme, albeit not nearly as effectively as any of the other bands, and without a drummer (points may be related).  With live members consisting of a vocalist, a (second) guitarist, and a hell of a lot of playback, they put up an oddly-sourced set of unexceptional blackened death metal that was at times difficult to watch (playback guitars are ok, but the live guitar should lead the playback rather than fill in behind it, always always always) and due to the volumes needed for the band to hear their drums out of the PA, occasionally impossible to listen to.  Their set basically read their Invert Christ CD straight down (if in different order), and though it improved a little at the end, the only way this band is going to make any significant improvement is to get more non-digitized members in.

All of Neldoreth.  Seriously.  The first draft note on this set read "bring your whole band", but this is as much of Neldoreth as there ever is in one building at the same time.

Obsidian Tongue [6/7]
The evolution continues; another Obsidian Tongue set close on the heels of this one ten days ago, but with a fairly substantial reshuffle of the (four-song) setlist, taking a different side on Volume I.  At this point, it's barely worth noting when this band does something excellent, but they continue to get better and better on each successive date.  If, as this show seems to indicate, restricted instrumentation/membership is going to be a coming thing in third-wave black metal/black metal generally, Obsidian Tongue are clearly at the forefront of it, and we around Boston somehow continue be able to see them do their alchemy on a $7 ticket.  Brendan's (joking) comments on "fuck you bassplayers fest" ((jokingly) disappreeshed by actual and frustrated bassists alike) aside, this set was essentially one long, uniform, high that only offended by eventually drawing to a close.

As implied, this one did finally finish, at which point I got Neldoreth's record (at 25 minutes, and less than 20 of original music, not such a great deal for $12, but bands that have the guts to tour still need the support) and picked up tapes from both Grue and Kleptocracy, then headed out across the bridges again, the rain completely gone.  Another one down.  Another day closer to the tour.