Scaphism with Coffin Birth, Vaporizer, and Xatatax [Ralph's, Worcester, 12/29/2011]

Despite a somewhat late start and traffic starting to pick back up again, I got out in good order, only most of the way through Woods II; this of course being in response to David Gold's passing, as would be a persistent and somber theme on the night. We will not hear these works live again here -- and if we'd thought the same a month ago, it was with the hopeful prospect of grooving on Woods V and scorning hipsters at the Middle East and larger venues further down the line. So it goes.

It was not all, of course, authentic despair, and presently the bands got rolling.

Xatatax [4/7]
I hadn't seen these guys before, but had heard decent things about them, and was interested to see how this was going to shake out. The basic impression was one of a 21st-century, post-underground answer to the Kinks or Blue Cheer, making up for their shortcomings in composition and technicality through loudness. As the set went on, they picked up a little, bringing stronger elements of black metal and hardcore into their fairly basic doom mix, but at this point the band still sounds a little underfinished. They're a young band, and there's no reason that they won't be able to develop the interesting parts of their sound further, but they're not quite there yet. This was a decent opener on a strong bill; it'll be interesting to see how they do next time out.

Vaporizer [6.5/7]
If this band template-cut their sound to Heaven Shall Burn's and wedged doom in where all the NWOSDM parts are in the original, they could not get closer. This isn't a bad thing by any means, though, just self-satisfied back-patting about a comparison that I happened to get right eighteen months ago. In the interim, the band has if anything solidified, further refining their doom-riffs-with-metalcore-delivery style to weapons grade. This outing may not have been as mindblowing as that first time, before my expectations were set, but it definitely felt more precise and replicable: Vaporizer is going to be this good, pretty reliably, whenever you see them, and if it wasn't for the unorthodox way that they approach doom metal, more people would be talking them up as the successor to Black Pyramid's vacated title belt. They're not, really, though; this is a band that stands on its own and should be appreciated for their own significant merits by a lot more people.

I'm not going to put a mark down on Matt's acoustic tribute to Dave and Woods in here; he didn't cover all the riffs or hit exactly the right cadences in the lyrics, but it was a good and valid tribute, scared up in the space of less than a week, from flat nothing, and one that I think Dave would probably have enjoyed and respected. If there's anything you get from Woods, it's the importance of taking things that other people have defined, refusing to be defined by them, and putting your own interpretation down. This was not Woods as Woods has been here before, but it wasn't intended to be: this was Matt Smith and a guitar taking a break to remember and let others remember.

The slack on "flat nothing", also, is mandatory, because Woods was one of those bands that everyone listened to but no one would dream of covering. For all Dave's impressive compositional abilities putting songs together, and his knack for memorable riffs and a biting, artful, turn of phrase, what really drew and will draw metalheads to Woods of Ypres was his gargantuan personal courage as a lyricist, the ability to strip-mine the most intimate highs and lows of his life and set that trauma to music. Who among us has not wrestled with shedding their own "Deadwood", and who has not bounced along the bottom of a "December in Windsor"? This identification gave a lot of people what they felt was a real personal connection to Woods and the man behind the texts, even if they didn't know him personally all that well, or at all, but the respect for that connection, and the respect people had for David in baring his soul that way, meant that nobody had ever sat down and tried to play any of his stuff for themselves past, maybe if that, "A Meeting Place And Time" off Woods I. There's something almost sacrilegious about putting your own interpretation on someone else's personal history; "...Mount Pleasant..." is abstract and well-known, and "You Are Here With Me" is short and nonspecific, making them approachable for a tribute like this. There's no way someone's going to sit down and try to interpret "The Ghosts of Summers Past" or "Into Exile", and that fact is what makes the loss so significant. Other bands will get tributes, and see covers worked into their fans' sets after they cease to be; Woods' material, the band ceasing to be, is in large part never going to be played live again. What we experienced, finally, on those three dates as they got some actual label support and were able to tour across English-speaking North America, has been foreclosed upon for future metalheads with a definite and sobering finality.

Coffin Birth [6/7]
I'm not sure about stabilized, but the Coffin Birth lineup has definitely solidified, for the time being with the additions of solid technicians Dana and Ari alongside Anthony. The result was a finely tuned, professionally processed-out set of blackened death metal, rolling forward with a firm and singular commitment and purpose, and not really getting blown back by the fan that various people in the front row lifted off the stage to blow air on Anthony from different angles with. Getting used to such stage gimmicks may happen with Belphegor, but what's much more relevant is that the band as they are is fully and completely beyond them. Eventually, they're going to get something recorded, and the world beyond New England is going to get a glimpse of the new-forged steel here.

Scaphism [6/7]
Back on home ground, Scaphism kicked out another solid set of straight-ahead brutal death metal, along with the usual banter bits; Tony alternately doing a best-of Pete Steele's crowd-heckling Type O lines and ripping on the audience for cheering for rape over stuff like chainsaws, Star Wars, and H.P. Lovecraft. The headlining set and no "Tower Deflower" left room in the set for the full Rape Trilogy ("Chainsodomy" -> "Raped Till Death" -> "Violating The Dead"), though not, if I recall correctly, all exactly one after the other. Truth told, though, the Metal Thursday audience is not a bunch of deranged perverts (ok, that may be a little far, "not a bunch of actual real-life rapists" is more strictly accurate), and the best crowd response was probably for "Pathogenic Bacteria", mostly because it came out fucking immense in this performance. As has been noted before, Scaphism is nothing if not consistent, and that consistency in producing high-level performances is going to get them noticed further afied sooner or later...and if they keep getting occasional out-of-region deathfest slots, it'll come sooner.


The bands having finished up, I headed out; I was technically on call and worn down from an early start to the day, but managed to get back home in one piece, and finish this shortly before heading out to see Fires of Old. Life rolls on, and sooner or later I will get better at documenting the relevant parts faster.

Faces of Bayon with Vaporizer, Wizardry, and Orim [Ralph's, Worcester, 6/17/2010]

I ended up missing out on the moved Eyehategod show on the Tuesday before this, mostly due to work commitments, but also due to a troublesome trend; if you look back at the two previous shows written up here, you'll notice that the dates involved are also the dates on which the Celtics lost in the Finals. Nights on which I had to sit home, they won. I clearly SHOULD have gone down to the Cambridge Elks for that gig, then, because the Celts ended up losing that night (indicating that I wasn't the jinx), and it was by all reports amazing, but I did still have work stuff to deal with that would have made it difficult.

The upshot of all of this is that if the Celtics were still going to fuck it up while I was sitting home, I had no excuse for not going out to a good show and ignoring the basketball. I was going out to this one anyway, but ignoring the game, as well as the buildup via going right from work, turned out to be the adaptive path. The last I saw, the score was in the single digits, and then coming out, I was on a lingering doom metal contact high and not bothered. I got in with decent timing, and it wasn't too long before Orim started things off.

Orim [5/7]
The first of four bands on this bill that I hadn't seen yet, these guys started a little shaky, but solidified, presenting a solid if somewhat derivative set of good old USHM roughly along the lines of Ravage. Orim had a little more in the way of Iron Maiden in the vocals, and a little more reliance on low-ended riffing to set up their songs, but clearly are coming out of the same American tradition, which is cool and more than a little impressive when you consider that the great balance of new ideas in power/traditional metal has been coming out of Europe over the last 15 years. They didn't have anything recorded yet, but will allegedly have a demo out in the near future; something to watch out for, even if only to see how this band, which is either relatively new or has been extremely insular in western MA for the last five years, develops this sound.

Wizardry [5.5/7]
Though these guys have cut down to a power trio from the five-piece listed on their current CD, they haven't cut down the sound much if any; this was a full-throated set of roaring metal building on about equal parts archetypal/stereotypical stoner doom and USHM in the Manowar-inherited-via-Slough-Feg style that (IMNSHO) we don't see enough of in this kind of music. The material, even more than the performance, seemed to get stronger as the set went on, so it's going to be interesting to see how these guys develop, and how they sound on record with the current lineup.

In addition to their self-titled record, I also picked up a bunch of matchbox-sized Wizardry promo cards to take overseas. With a month or so still to go before I ship out, New York is nearly as well represented in the grab bag of stuffs as New England; that's liable to change going forward, though, and it's certainly not like the bands aren't eminently deserving of the exposure.

Vaporizer [7/7]
Wow. Just unreal. To the extent that "doomcore" actually exists, this band are in the first echelon. There was a lot of hardcore in this mind-blowing set, but at least as much doom metal; this may be me just having watched the DVD that came with Deaf To Our Prayers again, but the total experience here was like nothing so much as if Heaven Shall Burn grew up filling their heads with Southern Lord's roster rather than Regain. A complete full immersion of thrashing doom, this also saw the most floor motion of the night; maybe not up to the very high standards of peak Metal Thursday moshing, but this was a doom metal night, and the crowd was both slightly different and less disposed to hit one another than on that'd be in for a more death/thrash/whatevercore bill.

These guys didn't end up having anything recorded available, so I got a shirt instead, and felt bad about the difficulty they went through digging out something in XL. More relevantly, people need to start paying more attention to Vermont, and to do more to bring bands out of there; there's a significant amount of good music, even just going on random gigs from the past year or so, that has developed in relative isolation because the state happens to not be strongly connected to the coastal belt. The major population centers are further north even than Maine, and the road network sucks with regard to getting people to Manchester, Worcester, Springfield, and Albany. It'd be more natural to play out more in Montreal, and from there the other populated parts of Canada, but someone put a national border and a language barrier in the way. Vaporizer's been putting some decent runs of dates together, so they may be over this hurdle, but people interested in interesting new metal bands might be well advised to check out the land of hippies and maple syrup.

Faces of Bayon [6/7]
This is pretty much letter-perfect as to what I want to hear, personally, when I listen to doom metal: fewer Sabbath structures and more of the pounding low end death metal at glacial tempos a la Cathedral's first album. By far the slowest and heaviest band of the night, this resulted in less floor motion, but built into a punishing set of moderately epic proportions that put a convincing capstone on a solid, well-rounded night of diverse perspectives on doom. Pure quality; their coming gig with Sin of Angels, no slouches in the dirty-and-excruciatingly-slow department themselves, will be a molten glass deathmarch of the first order.

Things eventually closed up, and people found out that the basketball game had gone the wrong way, but that was immaterial; this was a stellar show and a free and easy drive back, no matter how dead I ended up being the next day, which contributed to the lateness of this writeup. The last one should be done shortly, and then the one from either Abnormality or Hivesmasher, depending on how that coinflip goes, this weekend.