Aborted with Pyrexia, Totality, and Forced Asphyxiation [Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge, 4/1/2014]

As a quick look down the page will show, I have been out to approximately fuck-all shows for way too goddamned long.  I was sick for Destruction and on call for literally goddamned everything else, in a shit cascade of bad luck that will continue for Metal Church and Carcass, because of course it does.  This one, though, I was not on call for, so I gave Chinese a pass on the night and went out to see some fuckin death metal.

I got down wicked early, as it turned out, and probably should have taken the bus in instead -- same time, less expense -- but was out of practice, especially with the Middle East's ridiculous definitions of 'doors' to include 'like an hour and a half before the first band can be reasonably expected to start'.  In the meantime I drank a couple beers, caught up with some dudes I hadn't seen in a while, and generally chilled out.  Doors trickled from 7:00 to 7:30 to nearly 8, and eventually I did get in (other people's concerns about potential sellouts and lack of advance tickets being completely chimerical), got the latest CD off Pyrexia, and picked up another beer because jeezo, this was dragging on and getting hot.

Forced Asphyxiation [5/7]
It'd been along time since I'd gotten out to a gig, period, but longer still since I'd last seen Forced, who appear to have straightened out whatever rumored issues were hanging around them and have definitely filled out their sound via adding another guitarist.  The board wasn't super kind to them at the start, but this is kind of an occupational hazard of opening gigs, and the sound guy got them dialed in after about a song and a half, with fairly minor effects on flow.  Forced is continuing to develop their no-holds-barred style of brutal but minimally slammy death metal, at times getting more technical, at times picking up some black metal tropes, and throughout, almost completely about weed.  That's going to continue to be go-to gag for lazy reviews of these guys, but seriously, we give a pass to bands all over the map whose songs are all uniformly about murder, and there's some good fuckin death metal under here.  This was a good set, and the start of an extremely active floor on the night.

Forced roaring through some weed puns.

Afterwards, I got another beer and had a couple mostly-apologetic words with some hen mei de xiaojie who I'd been catching rather than tanking for, because I make a lot better wall than a window; this show had a good mix of people, but quite a few dudes like me pushing two meters, and the sadly normal lack of height sorting that you kind of get at gigs.  The normal solution for short people is to go forward, but when people are mixing it up right from the very first local opener, on a Tuesday night, it occasionally deters the smaller end of that spectrum.

Totality [5/7]
Totality continued the battering, laying out a solidly brutal but still committedly technical set featuring Jarret's 8-string upgrade.  As noted to a couple people (including some from Romania and France), Totality is probably, right now, the best techy death band in Boston; some of that is a lack of competition (seriously, you have Replacire and then a struggle to classify either Abnormality or Parasitic as distinguishably "Boston-based" when their members are spread out all along the coast), but a good chunk of it is on the band themselves, who continue to do interesting, technical things without getting totally up their own ass about it and still continuing to kick ass.  There's a next step that they still have yet to take, but they've improved in execution and diversity since the last time I saw them, and eventually some of this newer material should make it onto record to testify.

Totality shred the audience.

Here I got another beer and looked at the local bands' tables; unfortunately, I owned basically one of everything Forced Asphyxiation had out already (I don't go to as many shows any more, but I've still been to too many local shows), and Totality had one new shirt design and zero new records.  I already have far too many shirts, and I've been making a conscious effort to have fewer; I know they're better and more reliable value for bands, but at a certain point, if I can't trade it for Annihilation or Yn Gizarm gear in China, it's going to sit at the bottom of a pile in my spare room for six months at a time.

Pyrexia [6/7]
Somehow, despite being aware of their existence since forever, I had never actually seen this band; a long, thoroughly hammering set of classic slam-tinged NYDM definitely remedied that.  They're a little closer to the likes of Deeds of Flesh (turned over Age of the Wicked, saw Unique Leader, was 0% surprised) or Mortal Decay than Suffocation or Malignancy, but ultimately that just helps the synthesis, a concise distillation of most of the things that were going on in brutal death metal in the I-95 corridor from '95 to '05.  Both their new stuff and old tunes as far back as "Sermon of Mockery" got a great response, and while the floor kept it going on the brutal pace that the openers had set, there was enough room that Eric could spend the start of a song riding around the pit on dudes' shoulders.  Whatever you expect from an upstairs show, the scene and bands have at least the possibility to surpass it.

Pyrexia in a rare standing-still moment between songs.

After Pyrexia, because I had to drive home and thus stop drinking beers at some point, I mostly just picked up their other two records and an Aborted shirt that turned out to be not the one I wanted, because it was out of stock (at least in fat-dude sizes) already.  Five days into the tour, with most of North America, including a five-date run across the friggin Canadian prairies ahead of them.  From one point of view, this is a good thing; the last thing bands want to do is have merch left over at the end of their run.  From another, it's not: Belgians, especially with an American in the band now, should have the expectation that North Americans will be a little bigger/fatter, generally, even death-grind fans, than Europeans.  In picking the CDs up off Pyrexia, I talked a little with the guys; they were wicked impressed with the turnout and activity on a Tuesday night, and similarly impressed with the news that it's not out of the question to get 50-75% of these numbers at Roggie's or O'Brien's for three or four local bands.  It's not all the same people, and it's not uniform, obviously, but this gig was maybe 100-120 people, a little short of the max upstairs capacity, and it's not unknown for local/DIY shows to fill up the 75-person rooms they play at.  As previously noted, the scene around here is pretty damn good.

Aborted [6.5/7]
As good as the bands before them were, Aborted definitely took it up another level.  Due to an unlucky mix of cancellations and (if I recall correctly) oversleeping at festivals, I hadn't actually seen these guys before; this set definitely made up for lost time.  Their grind-flavored death blasted the room absolutely flat, inspiring about the fiercest pit action that I haven't seen members of Proteus and Dysentery involved in; North American floors remain more ferocious than their Euro equivalents, but the set definitely picked up a European coloring from other elements, from the melodic leads laid over everything to the roided-up ned in the Real Madrid shirt laying people out.  (Disclaimer: Andrew is a friend and not a ned, nor, as far as I know, actually on chemical gym supplements.  This doesn't matter when you're getting body-checked by some 6'/240lb meat tank.)  The beatings continued straight up to the venue curfew, over a short encore led in by a minimum of bullshit, and if nobody had really had enough by the time the lights went up, nobody can rationally claim to have gotten shortchanged by this set.

Sven churns the pit.

After the show, I picked up Aborted's new 7" (if you carry breakables on you at a death-grind gig, you are light in the brains and heavy in the wallet), then bailed.  The fact that I'm right up Mass Ave now made the run back easier, and I got in early enough not to be too affected the next morning.  Work and other commitments, though, pushed this writeup out; hopefully, I'll get the Satan gig at the conclusion of this on-call shift reported on faster.

Worcester Death Fest [Worcester Palladium, 6/10/2012]

This might have been more accurately written "Scott Lee Finds A Way To Have 21 Mostly-Local Bands Open For Six Feet Under Tour Fest", or I could have just covered the bands I did see in the title, but the first is too long and the second is way too long, as despite continuing my tradition of not watching Six Feet Under close out festivals, I did see enough of about seventeen bands to take down concrete descriptions.  Acculturated as I am to German experience, this barely met the definition of a festival.  Festivals take place outdoors, over multiple days, and pack in a minimum average of ten bands per day.  This "fest" only met one of the criteria, but that's not been a problem in the past, and in the "goddamn everyone shows up and hangs out" department, it did capture a bit of the festival feel.

After shaking off the cobwebs of the night before -- I was on call, and therefore had to play it fine, but even a pint an hour of Guinness adds up if you keep at it for eight hours -- I organized some food and some cash and headed on out, rolling up to the Palladium, around back streets due to a weird roadblock on Major Taylor, in just enough time to stow my steel in the vehicle and hide my pen under my belt before going up to get my ticket and get processed in.  I nosed around a bit and got a CD off Totality before heading down to the main stage; the upstairs didn't look set up yet, and the nebulous rumors that I'd heard waiting in line were indicative that most of the bands I actually wanted to see would be going on sooner rather than later.

Tony (Scaphism) and Brendan (Blood of the Gods) standing by a cairn of guitar cases.  Load in first, find out when/where you're playing after.

Scaphism [5.5/7]
Despite a sparse crowd in the cavernous downstairs, Scaphism got the fest off to a good start with humor, irony, and a good performance of most of their best material.  This wasn't that long a set, but Scaphism tunes tend to be kind of short, so they got a fair few out around Tony bantering with the crowd as well as with other bands setting up on the balcony.  They handled the new space pretty well, but might have brought more energy to the upstairs with a smaller gulf between the band and the audience.  Regardless, this was a good performance, and one that started the fest off on the right foot.

Scaphism on the big stage.

Hivesmasher [6/7]
I practically never goddamn see this band, so my sample space is a little constricted.  From the last time, they've lost their keys/samples guy, but if anything picked the energy up a notch.  In some places the songs seemd to run down after about a minute and a half, but this is why I tend not to listen to grindcore in the first place.  For what they do, though, Hivesmasher are really, really good, and when they're on, in those 60- to 100-second bursts, they are dead fucking on to an extent that barely any bands in the region can stand in with them.  All around killer set.

Aaron Heinold, the secret-Azn Barney Greenway, in a rare standing-still moment.

Since the upstairs bar still wasn't open, I went downstairs to get a beer, if I recall correctly some merch, and happened to see a bit of...

Eyes of the Dead [4/7]
I had not seen this band before and did not get a positive ID on them until checking in with the running order several hours later.  They did not, in the approximately half-set sample that I got from them, do a whole lot to drive me to make that ID, or to check them out on record.  From what I heard at least, they were putting out decently-executed but ultimately replacement-level death-thrash, along old lyrical tropes that didn't do much to grab the attention either.  On festivals, you will get bands like this; decent enough to fill out the lineup in the middle of the day, but fairly interchangeable with the promoter's other options.

Midway through, I ran into Juan from Untombed, who passed along two important bits of info: 1) Spain drew with Italy in what was probably the most entertaining match of the Euros to that point and 2) Sexcrement was going on next upstairs.  I promptly changed zones; I lost a little in terms of total music seen, but getting in place to see all of Sexcrement was more important than making it to the end of EotD's set.

Sexcrement [6/7]
That decision turned out to be well-justified.  I'd missed Sexcrement's release show, but they filled a lot of that value back in, pulling most of the material in this set off the new one, which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be as sleazily slamalicious as their previous output.  There were fewer (well, at least apparently fewer) trannies around than previous, and Adam didn't get his dick out, but even when you take out the chaos that swirls around them, Sexcrement are a damn good death metal band, and they put out a pretty damn good set on this outing.

I went upstairs to the merch area to pick up the two -- as it turns out, they reissued XXX Bargain Bin -- Sexcrement discs I was short, and by the time I got the purchase done and went back down, Blood of the Gods was setting up.  By this time I was running out of bands that I wanted to see, but hadn't yet, and Untombed and Dysentery were going to be going on later downstairs, so I stuck around rather than going to sample the downstairs.

Blood of the Gods [6/7]
This decision also turned out to be correct, as Blood of the Gods took up the challenge of the space (biggest I've seen them on since Church, iirc) and smashed out a strong, diverse, and yet unified set of their bruising sludge-death.  Their crust roots are still evident, if in nothing else than the fact that they're coming at death metal from a different direction from literally every other band on this bill, but they've moved beyond that point and easy Entombed comparisons to making something new, cool, and almost completely independent.  This was probably the best set I've seen from these guys, and the trend looks to be further up from here.

So that I wouldn't miss Untombed, and also because there was music there and a set change in the upstairs, I swapped zones again, and managed to catch most of Conflagration despite not making a positive ID on tha band, again, until I finally ran across the running order.

Conflagration [4/7]
I hadn't seen this band before, and despite my general distaste for the style, I tried to give them a fair shot, but ended up still with the impression that something was just off.  To a certain degree, I could pick out that this main-sequence metallic-MAHXC band (if you don't know what that is, you apparently haven't ever been to the NEMHF) was fighting the mixing board's legendary badness, but in places, it seemed like they were fighting against their own composition and arrangements as well.  They had some good bits in a few places, but not quite enough to convince me to check out their stuff on record and to see to what degree the downstairs board was fucking them over, and to what degree I just didn't care for the music.  They had a decently appreciative crowd/mosh melee, so apparently people into this style might want to check them out, but for the auld, crabbit, and bepanzert, sets like this are more part of the price to be paid for having festivals.

After Conflagration ended, with Untombed coming up, the floor pretty much 'rotated', with its former occupants clearing out and a new cohort, self included, coming down to fill the space.  There were, obviously, more people filling in now than we'd started the afternoon off with, but there was still a fair bit of space, and I was able to get pretty well forward without great difficulty.

Untombed [5.5/7]
More than the other bands that I'd seen moving up to the big stage for the first time, Untombed seemed to struggle a little at the start, whether from the gulf down to the audience or from the different aural environment (whether actual working monitors, or the Palladium-standard mix getting mispromoted through them).  Once they got their feet under them, though, they steadily improved through the course of the set and ended in characteristically strong fashion.  They'll be playing more sets in more intimate venues in the future, but they did a good job with their shot at the big stage, and particularly with keeping the crowd involved despite the distance.

Dave whips up the crowd for Untombed.

I'd gotten a look at the running order by this point, and 'running' was definitely the operative word.  The last three non-slotted bands that I had a particular interest in were on one after the other, and I had to move pretty quick about it.

Totality [5.5/7]
The main attribute from Totality on this exposure was their relentless tightness; as noted earlier, this is an important attribute for death metal bands working their way up, but the material that was on offer in that disciplined presentation was pretty much where Totality has been since I started seeing them.  The guitar solos have improved from that sample, earning the band some extra credits, and their merch distribution off the stage comes off as slightly less rockstar, but Totality is still a band yet becoming, and not quite where they want themselves to be yet.  They're getting there, and if they can take that step up in songwriting to match their execution, they'll be that much closer.

Totality keep it tight.

Dysentery [6.5/7]
As the afternoon wore on, bands got longer sets, and more people got into the venue, making the clip-overs from one set into the start of the next longer, and travel time between the upstairs and the downstairs longer still.  I missed more of Dysentery's set than other bands that got clipped because of this, but still managed to get up relatively close and in about the action, for about 75% of a weapons-grade slam hammering.  Dysentery had played this building before, though not as I've seen them downstairs, but they commanded the large downstairs stage and decently-filled downstairs room with as much aplomb and ferocity as they would have on a run-of-the-mill O'Brien's outing.  My knees still keep me out of pits, but even just listening to the music and holding the pit edge was a pure battle; the band could hardly have been heavier if they were throwing solid rubber bricks the size of shipping containers off the stage.

The dance floor is lit up for Dysentery.

Excrecor [5/7]
Head blasted straight in half, I got into the upstairs in good time for Excrecor, who unfortunately seemed to be having an off night.  Some of it may have been down to the drum monitors, which the band called out to the venue staff as just plain not working, and which could easily have been responsible for some of the desyncs, and some of it was probably the mix, which even in the upstairs seldom gets much past 'functional' for non-nationals, but the most succinct and likely explanation is that the band just had a down set, as bands will from time to time.  Excrecor's material remains what it is, and got a decent performance here, but the band's played more enjoyable sets in the past and will do better in the future than they did on this sample.

At this point, the furious running to and fro was over, and I could spend more inter-band time either browsing the merch stacks, or as I did for most of The Summoned, getting some foods down.  Eight of the nine local openers that I was actually interested in seeing had gone on by this point, and thanks to hard going, I managed to see most of the sets for all of the eight bands in question.

The Summoned [NR]
I heard only bits and pieces of this band, around transactions for food, beer, and merch, some of which were interesting melodeath pieces, and some of which were pieces of less interesting retreaded deathcore.  In total, though, there were not enough of those pieces, nor strong enough connections between them, to make any kind of informed assessment about what the band is like, let alone how this set was on any kind of subjective level.  I did pick up a CD from them, and found a mix of styles similar to that noted, executed at about the level you should expect from a good eastern-New-England local band, but not having a complete impression of this set, I can't accurately tell how much it varied from that recorded performance or in what direction.

Nemecide [4/7]
I had heard of this band before, and seen their name around, but I hadn't actually seen them live or happened on a demo yet.  After this set, I have more of an impression of why this was the case.  Nemecide's Bostonian blend of Behemoth and Killswitch Engage was decently executed, but not especially interesting, and so completely removed from the sound and culture of the local shows that I do go to as to seem to have originated on another planet.  In a way it's good to go to festivals to see that there's such a broad range of viable bands out there, and large audiences for everyone when that range can be unified, but the opportunity to avoid bands like this and overdose on the kvlter than kvlt is why I go to Party.San....and increasingly in recent years, not to NEMHF.

As noted above, I had seen the running order by this point, and yet elected to stay put.  Some of this was due to the fact that even an average metal performance is pretty decent, and inertia is a powerful force, but part of it was the conviction that the remaining bands, upstairs and down, were pretty much of a piece, and I gained more by resting up for later than I might theoretically have been losing by running around.  It all works out in the end.

Conforza [4.5/7]
As it was, I ended up seeing the whole of Conforza's set, another first exposure to a band that I'd seen mentioned on a fair number of bills but not actually seen live before.  They got a good response from the crowd for their performance of a technically proficient deathcore set, though the reigning impression from my seat was of a sound thoroughly past its sell-by date, one that might have resonated a few years ago in the company of Ion Dissonance or Despised Icon, but in 2012 was more just echoing back.  That crowd response indicates there's still an audience for it -- it's just that I'm pretty sure I won't need to take active measures to be a part of it going forward.

The two foregoing notes should contradict any notion that I've lost rigor in score distributions, or pull punches talking about local bands.  The real reason that scores have converged as they have, and that I don't savage bands too often, is that lately I just don't see a lot of bands that I don't like.  There is little that separates Nemecide or Conforza from the national acts in their respective styles that you would see at, for example, the NEMHF -- it's just that I don't go to the NEMHF any more, in large part to avoid seeing seven hours of bands that I mostly don't care for and would be pasting 3s and 4s on, with accompanying commentary pretty much exactly in line with the above.  Some fans may take comfort in that assertion; for the rest, oh wow, an old jerk in an armored kutte doesn't like deathcore.  Shock horror.  Send me hate mail, I'll publish it.

Vattnet Viskar [6/7]
I moved up again for this band, if only to catch them as at the time of signing, since it had been a while.  What I got was worth it, an intense and driven set of third-wave black metal that shed a lot of its alleged hipster aspects, following Fell Voices more closely than Wolves In The Throne Room.  (Observant TWBM elitists/completists will notice that this merely ameliorates, rather than straight-up eliminates, the nebulous accusations of hipsterism.)  Though their history is fairly short, and their antecedents deemed by some as "politically unreliable", it's difficult to see on this set how Vattnet have not earned their 'promotion'; they were fully able to carry both the large stage and the overwhelmingly death-metal crowd, with enough poise and violence to be able to take this sound on the road, and avoid the drop for longer than the couple months the band are estimating it at right now.  There are going to still be a few dead-enders who begrudge them the nod, and probably a couple more who'll assert that on material alone, another band from the area (Obsidian Tongue, say) should have been the one to carry the third-wave banner out of the Boston area, but if Vattnet can continue to hit these marks (and kick Liturgy in the goolies at any opportunity), most people will be fine with them getting the exposure.

Vattnet peel the layers back.  (Also: footwear doesn't show up, but uniformly met with the censors' approval.)

Fit For An Autopsy [5/7]
The last of the localish bands up, Fit For An Autopsy dumped out an earthshaking set of competently-tuned deathcore that ultimately came out with a lot more hitting power than originality.  Despite this, it was a decent time, as this music usually is at this high a level of delivery -- and Nate had probably the best-tuned banter of the night, even with Frank Mullen's gems later.  In every opportunity to talk to the crowd, he continually barked up the next three bands: Revo, Fetus, and Suffocation alone, with never a mention, for the whole run of the set, of Six Feet Under.  I regularly ignore Six Feet Under as well, and would end up going home on the night without seeing them, but it was still humorous to get this attitude from someone on the bill, on the stage, where he'd have to deal with the wrath of publicists and tour managers.

Revocation [6/7]
Though there may have been a tour or two that I missed, this was at least the first time I'd seen Revocation on the big stage at the Palladium, and they handled it well -- more accurately, they flat killed it, despite no Anthony (whether a tendonitis flare-up, or other non-band-life issues) and not really enough time.  Most of the set was off Chaos of Forms (entirely appropriate, as it's the latest that they have out), but there was a fair amount of older stuff as well, including opening with "Re-Animaniac", which just goes to show what the hell I know.  They've done better on smaller stages, but this kicked a lot of ass, and when they come back next month, they'll likely be more in command of the larger stage.

Revocation slashing into "Dismantle The Dictator".

It's worth mentioning that while the sound downstairs was really not that bad for most of the bands, it took a definite step up for Revocation and the bands following them, either because they got a real sound check on arriving at the venue in the morning, or because the touring bands brought their own sound guy, who was less of a boots-on-the-head] than the normal Palladium knob-twirlers.  I was watching the bands, not the soundboard, so I can't tell for certain, but the improvement was marginal enough to suggest the former rather than the latter.

Dying Fetus [6/7]
Though I moved off the floor and back up onto the terraces for Dying Fetus, the effect carried all the way back.  This was another and brutal strong set, but a little more weighted towards the band's older material than I've seen from them before, likely synching up with the re-releases of older material that I indulged in at the merch stand.  It was pretty decent runtime-wise, but still felt a little short; maybe due to closing out with "Kill Your Mother, Rape Your Dog", or maybe they went back to that classic grindblast pisstake due to runtime constraints.  Either way, this set was relentlessly impressive, and to a certain degree could have kept going for another hour and still left the audience wanting more.

Suffocation [7/7]
Suffocation were technically another "name local" along the lines of Vattnet or FFAA, but the set that they delivered was fully headliner-worthy (Note: Suffo-Fetus-Revo-FFAA, not a totally terrible tour package, either artistically or as a commercial proposition).  Despite the lineup changes (no Mike, boo to the wasted energy executing his parts), Suffocation delivered a monster set of ceaseless slams with ceaseless professionalism.  We got a couple tunes off the forthcoming album (due to start recording in August to drop next year, iirc) in with a good mix of newer and older stuff -- with a definite concentration on Effigy..., which the band, at least per Frank, appears to have accepted as their definitive record -- and uniformly first-rate banter from Frank, who kept it focused as well as funny, and got to the punchline of his Miami-bath-salts-zombie joke before any of the Celtics fans in the crowd bounced any empty containers off his skull.  Most Suffocation sets, as the sample space of the last eight years indicates, do not turn out quite this good, but when they do, they are fucking killer.

Suffocation only finished up at 10 PM, but at this point I'd been thrashing out for 9 hours, including that frantic four hours back and forth, back and forth, at the start, and was worn down to a bare nub of permanently-dissatisfied kutte-wearing elitist.  I considered things over, and decided to take a pass on Six Feet Under in favor of not dying on the way home or sleeping through my alarm Monday morning.  Both of those turned out to be close calls -- don't listen to Woods of Ypres if you're concerned about falling asleep behind the wheel -- but ultimately I got back, unpacked the four shirts and eight CDs -- two Sexcrement, one Totality, one Dying Fetus, one The Summoned, and three, from Abacinate and Hammer Fight plus a Scion (spit) sampler that I'd gotten Relapse-grab-bagged while picking up a Revocation shirt -- and plowed through the work week largely unaffected.  Of course, the recuperation time and the time needed to actually write this up put in some delays, but you do what you can.

Coffin Birth with Soul Remnants, Naegleria, and Totality [Ralph's, Worcester, 6/30/2011]

Due to getting meshed in much less pre-holiday traffic than I was anticipating, I got out to Worcester pretty early and spent more time than anticipated rattling around in a nearly-empty Ralph's, moderating my beer intake. I probably could and should have found more stuff to kill time with before leaving, but fast transit is never really guaranteed, roadworks are unpredictable, and staying in the goddamn office until damned near 8 pm is soulkilling enough as it is. Regardless, people filled in presently and the bands got going.

Totality [5/7]
Totality's sound here was a little less dense than Tuesday, which maybe opened things up some; whether real or illusionary, they came off as more technical and less straightforward B-string fanning. (Not a real term, but if you watch enough 7-string death metal bands, you should understand it immediately.) The sound was also a little mangled at the start, maybe as a consequence of one of the guitarists playing directly into the PA rather than through a cab. This was a little odd, but consistent with the still odder intimation that the band had showed up in a taxi and borrowed a drumkit and the cabinets they did have from the other bands. Weird, sure, but still pretty killer, and still a band to pay attention to going forward.

At the conclusion of their set, Totality chucked a bunch of CDs into the audience rather than having them on a spindle at a table in the back. This was a little rockstar for a Metal Thursday, but more and more importantly, less effective. I picked one of them up and, unsurprisingly for a CD without a case or sleeve that was bounced off the floor and had to hang out in a jacket pocket for the rest of the night, the second of the two tracks on it was scratched pretty much to unplayability. If you want to get your music out to people, it helps if they're able to listen to it -- and when you're this good, you don't need to throw your media at your audience and risk damaging it.

Naegleria [5/7]
I hadn't heard Naegleria previously, more due to bad luck on my part than the band, as they've been around and on decent bills for a fair while now. What we got was decent, unassuming, high-powered straight-ahead slamming death metal that made up in crush whatever it gave away in originality. This is another band that I was frustrated not to be able to move around for; the lesson, for all the wee kids in the audience (i.e., anyone under 25), the lesson is to thrash as hard as you can, whenever you can, because someday your legs will call it a day on you, and you'll never be able to do so again. The rest of the crowd, though, started getting violent here, so there was no lack of people to toss back, and with the exception of "You're Gay" (probably the first time in the history of the world that people have just stood around and listened to an Anal Cunt song being played live rather than thrashing around while dodging half-bricks and broken furniture getting thrown off the stage), the violence served to complement and round out the music rather than as a necessary condition. Still a cool set, and yet another reason to get another knee brace before that Dysentery gig at the end of August.

Soul Remnants [5.5/7]
I'm not sure quite how much of a notch Soul Remnants took it up from last time; something, to be sure, but picking points between scores can get to be a real exercise in hair-splitting sometimes. Their influences from Carcass and At The Gates were probably a little more prominent here, and the venue sound really allowed it to cut through. While Soul Remnants are a lot more solid than superlative right now, there's not a lot of bands in New England doing this older style of death metal, and a solid set from a good band is still good value for your night out.

Coffin Birth [5.5/7]
Vice December, the fan made a comeback, but here, was more necessary and less stagecraft -- Ralph's gets devilishly hot in the summer just standing around in the general audience areas, let alone under the stage lights. Also as in December, Coffin Birth quickly put any peripheral silliness out of mind with a hammering set of black-death metal -- with the important difference that this was in Worcester, so on this set, you could have Crazy Dan taking things to new heights with the first instance of breakdancing noted at Metal Thursday. Whether it was intentional or he just had difficulty standing up initially after going over in the pit, it happened: I would instantly lose all credibility if I tried to make something like that up. That, even more than the usual pit action, was pretty hardcore radikvlt -- fortunately, the Morbid Angel cover that the band closed with wasn't.

At the end of the night, I was pretty well dead; fortunately, the highways were mostly empty and nearly free of egregious construction, so I blasted home in good time, then didn't finish writing this up for most of a week because holiday weekends tend to be over-strenuous for some reason. Next up is the next Metal Thursday; The Accursed dropped, but the rest of the bill is well worth it, and then it's another two shows in two days, in the which time I probably have to do a gear-out check. Just over three weeks till I hit the road.

Scaphism with Formless, Totality, and Replacire [Church, Boston, 6/28/2011]

Because I misread Church's door time as something that might have some relationship with the show start (I should know better about this place by now), I headed down a little earlier out of work than I strictly needed to, and since there was no baseball game, was able to park south of the river and get in as the bands were loading in. This resulted in a lot of time to kill, but if the Red Sox were hopeless, the atmosphere at Church is still class, and I was able to get in a couple beers, a good bit of hanging about, and 32 copies of the BCS split from the Scaphism guys. It'll be a little challenging to get all of them moved, but 8 total at Wacken and 8 per day at Party.San isn't outside the range of possibility. Challenge accepted.

A little after 9, everything was ready to go, and the bands started up.

Replacire [4/7]
This set really demonstrates how hard it is to get up to average. You can't fault Replacire for listening to the last Cynic record and saying "this is cool and all, but it'd be awesome if there was more death metal in it"; the issue is that this turns into a really big ask for a band to do originally and to perform live. The band's chops are solid, and their modern-jazz influences just as apparent as their death-metal ones, but their compositional and arrangement skills are significantly short of where they need to be to make this kind of music really work. It's good, in a way, to see younger bands biting off more than they chew like this; as they go on, they're going to get better at junking the parts that don't work and stitching the ones that do together into a more cohesive framework. There's nothing wrong with this band that isn't going to improve with experience, but they don't have that experience yet, and it showed in this performance.

Further indicating that this band will have better results as they learn to put songs together better, they did a bang-up, smashing cover of Bloodbath's "Eaten"; it stuck out like a sore thumb as being significantly less complicated than any of their original work, but they killed it basically down to the ground. This is not a bad band, and as soon as they get a handle on the black art of turning riffs into songs rather than pasting them together with Bondo, there's every chance that they're going to come up with something really cool.

Totality [5/7]
Cutting immediately back in the other direction came Totality; there are a lot of precedents for brutal 7-string death metal with a lot of breakdown parts, but if you execute it well enough, people concentrate on the band in front of them, not the foot-high stack of CDs in their closet that they're not super separable from. Solid, heavy, and vicious, Totality turned in a kickass death metal performance; looking across at the remaining shows list, I'm down to see them a couple more times in the next couple weeks, which is definitely something to look forward to.

In about here, I picked up a swack of Scaphism stickers to go with the CDs -- or, more accurately, to leave on tables when I'm not able to push CDs on people. The trick to successful festival promotion is not just having a lot of stuff, and the right stuff, but the right mix of stuff to stand out and appeal to varying audiences.

Formless [5/7]
Much better than the last time I saw them, Formless put out a quality and crunchy performance of technical death metal that also got the crowd moving, probably at its high-water mark, which was pretty dense for a Tuesday night show. They had a few pick points with timing in a couple places, and with either the equipment or the mix in a couple others, but this is a dynamic, developing band that, if they continue on this trajectory, is going to be one of New England's better death metal outfits in pretty short order.

Fun (?!) bass facts: Craig plays with up to eight fingers, which is rare enough to warrant comment, at least from other bass nerds, and combined with how he does a lot of his fingerings, is a pretty strong indicator of a lot of formal training. Some bad habits might suggest that that training came from someone who was more comfortable on guitar, but can be otherwise explained: it's actually pretty normal to not have the hand strength to fret stuff on the E or B strings with your pinky, and I learned bass playing an upright, and also have persistent issues with leaving my thumb on the lowest string rather than on the pickup, let alone freehanding like you're supposed to. This may not be very interesting, but I do have previous; when someone's doing something technically interesting to me, I reserve the right to nerd out about it.

Scaphism [6/7]
Scaphism have also picked it up a notch lately, one would suspect partly from this being the conclusion of a mini-tour wrapped around an appearance at Brutality Reigns. (Obviously, I didn't make it out to this one; a lot of cool bands, but not quite enough, overall, to balance out the "drive out to goddamn Rochester" part. Maybe next year.) In addition to the older material coming out punchier and somehow more crushing, the band continues to crack out new stuff -- in this case, the obligato Lovecraft piece -- that meets or exceeds their previous high standard. Malika coming up to do guest vocals added some extra bite to the set, but the raw quality of slamming death on offer was consistently high from start to finish. When they finally decide they've got enough material, between the demo, their third of the abovementioned split, and the newer songs that haven't been released yet, to put out a full length, it's definitely going to be a record to watch out for, and probably one that committed death metal fans aren't going to have to work too hard to hunt up.

The only regret on this, obviously, was that I wasn't amenable to getting thrown in the pit on various occasions; I've got zero ligaments left in my knees and kind of need to keep my feet set if I want to be able to walk at the end of the night. Mass and friction coefficients took care of that, so after minimal checks to make sure my leg parts were still in working order, it was back out, and back home fairly early as I parked less than a mile away and 93 is much closer to 'functional' than it was a couple months ago. Next up is Coffin Birth, then probably Autumn Above and a preliminary gear check at the weekend.