Summoning Hate with Weregild, Forced Asphyxiation, Splatter Effect, and Soul Annihilation [O'Brien's, Allston, 6/22/2012]

I checked the weather before heading out in the morning, based on info from the gas station the night before, and despite the incoming rain, I loaded up only my lightweight rig.  This, again, was training; I'll have the full-weight rig in Germany, but unless absolutely necessary, I'm probably not going to wear it on the hike across the old inner-German border, and that goes off rain or shine.  It's too easy, in training for these things, to just decide to skip a session because it's raining, or too hot, or whatever, but actually in the field, I need to be able to make that hike in whatever conditions.

The conditions this time around, though, turned out to be pretty optimal.  It was only a light rain by the time I hit the ground, and it was a quick hike over to O'B's in still-melty heat.  This ended up dropping me on the stoop before even the door guy showed up, so I hung about outside for a while in the vain attempt to catch a breeze, and then went in to get my temporary license disrespected and pick up a beer.  This then showed that the prior heel-"cooling" was a mistake: O'Brien's, for the first time ever that I can recall, had functional air conditioning.  We've come a long way from the old days.

Soul Annihilation [5/7]
Though it had been barely two weeks since the last show, Soul Annihilation's shown some definite improvement on this outing, staying generally tighter and in some respects working the delivery of their black-death violence a little better.  The set started to run down about midway through, but this is largely due to the material: a lot of what Soul Annihilation has right now is pretty basic, and this will improve as they continue writing as a full band.  There is a good base of chops and talent here, and enough really good stuff at the start  to easily see their development to continue to improve.

Sean catches the light as Kunjan thrashes out.

Splatter Effect [5/7]
It had been a while longer since I last saw this band, who have also changed it up a little in the intervening, taking a more straightforward line on their mix of NWOSDM and hardcore, bringing it more into line with what the inventors of the alleged NWOAHM in this part of the world were doing in the mid-'90s -- and largely stopped after In Flames broke out stateside.  This was a good performance on the music as well as the history factor, and it's definitely cool that this sound, in whatever permutation, continues to be relevant.

Splatter Effect, focused delivery.

Forced Asphyxiation [5.5/7]
If there was one thing that this performance really emphasized, it is that this band is really getting to the level where they need an actual PA to present their sound: it's not enough to just play out of the cabs and hope everything's balanced.  There was a little bit of chaos at the start as everything got dialed in properly, but the band picked it up after that point, and smashed out a good, solid set that built steadily through to the finish -- and, for what may be the first time, was not mostly about weed.  Those moaning about the end of an era, though, can shut up and clock the band's kickass new "Robocrop" shirt, which I picked up here after running out of belt slots (and also cash) in Worcester.

Ryan lays it down, after recovering.  He fell into, but not over or through, the drumkit, during the second song or so, but recovered his balance and kept playing.  Elite.

Weregild [6/7]
I'm not sure if the band claimed this as their Boston debut, but it was definitely the first time I'd seen them in the city -- and more importantly, another solid push forward in the development of their rock-solid, heavily-Amon-Amarth-influenced evolution of viking death metal.  They've tweaked the lineup a little since last time, but continued in the same general vein without a break, and the result is steadily more impressive, both in the honing of the old material and the steps up in quality and (to a lesser degree) independence of the new stuff.  "Journey Through Musphelheim" remains the best song in Weregild's repetoire, but "Winterlands I Braved" is nearly as good, and if the stuff that the band is working on but not playing out yet continues in this fashion, their eventual demo is going to be must-get -- and it's not out of the question that it might not be complete Amon Amarth worship.  Absolutely immense.

If "We must kill / To Honor Our Dead", then Weregild definitely kills it enough to satisfy the condition.

In here, I went outside for a bit, mostly to unwind my back, as despite the strong turnout the AC was still keeping the temperature kind of in check.  It had cooled off a little outside, but not enough that I didn't get back in, and lined up for Summoning Hate's set, well before time.

Summoning Hate [6/7]
Weregild had set a really high mark, but Summoning Hate, as should really be expected by now, managed to pull out a relentlessly killer set, packed with craft and nuance as well as straight-ahead brutality, and definitely get up to that mark.  Show after show, year after year, Summoning Hate continues to both produce at a high level and continuously tweak and refine their take on largely-traditional brutal death metal, and at this point it is pretty unambiguous that they're just about the best Boston death metal band with no recordings available -- and unfortunately, there's no immediate sign of the second part of that changing.  In the meantime, though, as long as we continue to get killer sets like this, as frequently as the band does play out, we miss less from them not having a CD out.  The rest of the world, not so lucky.

Alex catches the sidelight as the band starts up.

After Summoning Hate closed up, I hung around a bit but still ended up not picking up anything else for export, then beat feet across the bridges.  Between the Euro knockout rounds and then Iron Maiden, not a lot got done in the intervening week, but here this pile of misapprehensions is, backlog cleared, one month away from the last wayfaring.

Graveheart with Sauriel, Obsidian Tongue, and Weregild [Ralph's, Worcester, 5/3/2012]

Though the (six-six-)sixth anniversary of Metal Thursday was a little less flashy than the fifth (not to mention contained in one night rather than spread over two), it was still, as usual, a pretty kickass bill on offer, and with two bands releasing fairly anticipated CDs.  (Graveheart's record is, so far, only out digitally; the prediction referenced last time is still on for an eventual physical release.)  So it was out across the hills and through the rain, under the light of towns and strip malls bouncing back off the blanketing clouds, jamming Sagas again, because for some reason the wet New England spring calls out for this music.  Also, under the prevailing traffic conditions, the disc will play through exactly once during the ride from Burlington out to the Ralph's parking lot, which is convenient.  I got in, as expected, a little early, and after establishing that there probably weren't going to be any Weregild shirts on offer, I sat about and cooled my heels waiting for the bands to start.

Weregild [5.5/7]
Cape Cod's finest locally-sourced low-fat Amon Amarth substitute have taken their game up a notch since last time, both in design and in execution, despite the fact that they had Kyle from Sentinel covering the second guitar on short notice.  There were a few desyncs that probably came down to that, but for the most part, the band was dead-on, and if they didn't ever get the floor motion they were looking for, even on the final breakdown in "Journey Through Muspellheim", they did get a lot of headbanging and a good strong reaction from a crowd that had not yet begun to drink.  Weregild remains, and likely will continue to remain, so obvious an Amon Amarth clone that their ceiling in terms of exposure is pretty low, but the excellent execution involved here -- to get to the point where you can actually clone Amon Amarth live in the first place --  also guarantees the band a fairly high floor.  This isn't a band that's going to take over the world, but they're likely going to continue to improve local bills around the area for a while yet.

Weregild (permanent members and loanee) concentrating wicked hard.  This is the final and most vital part of cloning Amon Amarth as an original band.  First, you have to write Amon Amarth riffs, which with the body of work they have, is an easily-referenced task.  Then you need to tweak your instrumental and vocal tone to match; with experience, the right gear, and some trial and error, this is also eminently doable.  Then comes the hard part: ceaseless precision.  It's not immediately obvious, but a lot of Amon Amarth's separation from other bands, and how they got to the top of the game, is that they are incredibly precise about staying locked in and keeping all of the guitars exactly on top of each other.  This is, of course, wicked hard to do, especially in a small club where most of the sound is coming out of the cabs rather than the PA and the monitors can be intermittent, but it's also expected if you're going to try to sound like Amon Amarth.  Weregild's commitment to precision, even as here at the expense of looking at the audience rather than their own hands, is what keeps them on the right side of the enormous gulf between "cool Amon Amarth clone" and "failbad Amon Amarth ripoff".

Obsidian Tongue [6/7]
In the past, I've had concerns about how far Obsidian Tongue would be able to take what they're doing as a guitar-and-drums duo.  Six months on and with a full-length album under their belts, those concerns have been convincingly laid to rest via a fully-developed and significantly diverse set of third-wave black metal.  Neither excessively hipster nor necro for its own sake, OT manage to convincingly balance their atmospheric and raw elements as well as keep the music vital despite the reduced instrumentation.  They dropped in a couple keyboard passages for effect, and since this was a local show, were able to bring Christina up out of the audience to do her parts on "Distant, Residual", but for the most part, this set was guitar, drums, and two throats, and of this proved to be entirely sufficient.

Brendan contemplating the infinite.

Naturally, in this break, I picked up OT's new record and also a shirt, and continued to weigh the options on Sauriel's stuff.  They didn't have the full packaged CD yet, so they were giving away burns in half-height cases with the insert, and though I was not crazy about having to take home another shirt (I purged like 30 a couple months ago, and the stacks have built right the fuck back up again) in order to give the band money, I remain reluctant to take CDs with actual production value on them without paying.  Had I known that these were MP3CDs instead of something with uncompressed audio on them, maybe I'd've been less reluctant, but things worked out the way they eventually worked out.

Sauriel [5/7]
I hadn't seen Sauriel since they were putting out their demo seventeen months ago; in the intervening, they've gotten a little more deathy and a little more vital, but are on the cusp of another member change, on this gig bringing in a new drummer and saying farewell to a guitarist.  (The incipient sound changes are still undefined of course, but more significant of the fact is that Rob didn't really deserve to have his last show with Sauriel be the one where he lost his balance and fell over backwards into his amp 30 seconds into the first song.  Still happened.)  On this sample, playing the new Akasha record pretty much straight down in order, they showed a sound more inspired by the likes of Behemoth and Belphegor in its mix of death into black metal, but independent of those influences even if they stayed within that generally mainstream ouevre.  It's decent, to be sure, but given the members' previous history, there's more that they can -- and should, in the future, be able to -- do to distinguish themselves.

Sauriel gets Chris (Smite The Righteous, ex-The Accursed) up to draw some "Ritualistic Circles".  Seeing this band is in a way pretty bittersweet; everyone involved is/was in fairly major NWOSDM-driven bands back when "Gothenchusetts" was a thing, and now, they're playing NEMHF-mainstage black metal and having internet bampots question the continued relevance of their sound.  Acaro notwithstanding, the tide on that part of the scene has well and truly set.

In the present, though, I still did get Sauriel's new CD, picked up a bunch of stickers to take over, and ended up via the pay-the-band impulse with a shirt that I can wear but won't; it's on the pile with the Herugrim one for export.  These things work out, but pack space is, thanks to having to take shirts again, getting more limited faster than anticipated.  If you want CDs exported, take action quick.

Graveheart [6/7]
This set started a little slow, but got cranked up as the band got going, building to a frantic and hammering climax as the floor finally, finally got moving, partly due to "civilian" "tourists" and partly due to Chris and Samantha passing out gratis whiskey shots.  (Those who dodged the cover weren't supposed to partake, but there were enough of us stalwarts not partaking due to an impending hour-plus drive through the depredations of the state police that it probably came out in the wash.)  Alcohol and metal girls flipping out, in addition to the band's Metallica-Slayer-Sepultura-based deathed-up thrash hitting into a couple of their better tunes right at that point, got things proper violent, and if the "tourists" started out taking the piss, it was pretty clear that at least for a moment, they were into it for real by the end.  Graveheart's mix of the accessible and the extreme tends to work that way, and the band delivered a really killer second half after a good first half, and ended the night on a definite high note.  We're still waiting for a physical release of Return of the Curse of the Creature's Ghost -- though you can download it, and as a wag noted last night, you can't download alcohol -- but when that does arrive, it'll be a releaseshow and a half.

Graveheart chugging away (trololololol) on "Drinking From A Horn".

After it was clear no encore was on offer, I beat feet for the exits and got home shortly after 2, with a minimal exhaustion load, and accordingly got this turned around quicklike.  I go on call tonight, but if everything goes right, I may make it to Sabaton and/or Black Pyramid before the shift finishes.  We'll see.

Excrecor with Weregild, Infera Bruo, and Wormwood Prophecy [Ralph's, Worcester, 6/16/2011]

On the way out to this rather awesome show, as I got onto 290 from the Pike, I saw, ominously stretching back towards Worcester, the westbound side of that highway at a dead stop. I've gotten gun-shy about construction due to my commute being across the 93-95 interchange (and thus wrecked by knock-on effects of the Fast 14), so I was cautious about this, but, crucially, I didn't take a look in the rear-view to see what exits were blocked. This will show up again later.

Regardless, I got in to the venue in decent time, drank up, and watched Wormwood Prophecy get their gear in order. It's not often that you see DIY bands touring with their own lights, in-ear monitors, a guitar rack for their axes and a trolley to lug stuff around with, but there you go. It took a while getting all of this set up, but eventually, everything was dialed in, and the touring band kicked things off.

Wormwood Prophecy [5/7]
You see a bunch of young guys with good gear out on the road these days, and you automatically think "thrash revival"; fortunately, Wormwood Prophecy was anything but. Their composition was a little lacking in places, but they brought a lot of energy and good chops, earning a good positive response from the crowd, and quite a bit more motion than you normally see with an opening act. Some people might want to dock them points for originality, but that's priced in; I don't listen to Children of Bodom past Hatebreeder either, and if bands want to play high-energy blackened melodic metal that stripmines Something Wild and said other record for riffs, so much the better. If these guys are touring with all this hardware this young, they've got the necessary drive and ambition to take their composition up a notch going forward, and when that happens it's better to have a band aiming at the limelight built on classic Bodom rather than the modern turn-the-crank version.

Wormwood Prophecy closed with a Katy Perry cover that few people recognized and some suspected the band had made up out of whole cloth to excuse a poppy song. Not the case, but those of us who've seceded from pop culture weren't missing much, as even for a pop song, the original is kind of crap.

Infera Bruo [6/7]
First gig, my eye. If this is a baseline of what to expect from Infera Bruo, the other third-wave black metal bands of New England better start looking over their shoulders. Fusing turn-of-the-century Emperor and Enslaved in a storm of electronic noise, but also starting to evolve a sound not strictly dependent on either, Infera Bruo put out a solid set of a limited number of expansive but still fairly raw black metal compositions. "Expansive", actually, may undersell the band a little; the guitarist blew out his D string midway through a song, continued until reaching a break where he didn't have much to do, swapped to a backup about as that part was finishing, and then had his original axe back re-strung and roughly tuned by one of their guys at the end of the song. I'll definitely be looking out for this bunch on future gigs, watching out for them to record something as well.

In about here, I picked up a Wormwood Prophecy shirt and demo; I can take the hit on the shirt, and decent bands that make the trek up from Jax deserve the support. I also wheedled a couple extra demos out of them for overseas distribution; most of that allocation is still going to New England bands, but five CDs in sleeves isn't going to hurt any, and it's not like I don't have weird extras from Gwynbliedd and Morne already affecting the total balance.

Weregild [5/7]
If there's a band out there that sounds more like Amon Amarth than these guys do, it must be Hegg and Mikkonen's horde themselves. This is both a good and a bad thing; bad because for the life of me I can't see how Weregild gets any traction at all, but good because Amon Amarth does not tour the states every month, and seeing Weregild provides a significant fraction of that experience, one would hope, significantly more often. Seriously, the resemblance in tone and song structures is so close as to almost be a cover band -- not like this is a bad thing, though; as noted, there is generally not enough well-executed live deathviking music with melodic leads out there in this part of the world, and if you aren't in serious danger of banging your neck in half listening to "Journey through Musphellheim", you need to definitely re-evaluate why the hell you go to metal shows, or even listen to this music generally. If this is Weregild's ceiling, I don't think the band, or their audience, will have any complaints -- and if they kick on and end up doing something different and more independent of their influences (or even broader to take in, say, Unleashed's thrash/punk tempos or Mithotyn's more developed melodics), still better.

It was with great anticipation that I picked up Excrecor's EP here; I'd been waiting four years for this, and was stunned to get it for free. This also vindicated itself in the CD player on the way out; Synchronicity is a solid fucking record.

Excrecor [5.5/7]
There's a lot of room for change in four years; in that time, or at least in the change of venues from a couple pallets at the back of Mark's to the regionally-renowned Ralph's PA, Excrecor's opened up their sound substantially, weaving in more developed leads and a greater range of influences. The base of a Hypocrisy-like bridging of the first and second waves of Swedish death is still there, but so's a nontrivial measure of late Carcass, as well as a dose of more blackened metal, resulting in the first band on this bill that I don't have an immediate and easy point of direct comparison to. Ultimately, the labels don't matter; Excrecor is a solid, hard-hitting, technically developed death metal band that knocked out a nice, longs, solid set here, and are worth a listen on future bills, or just on record if that's the only way you can get ahold of their stuff. The floor wasn't as violent for them as for Weregild, but they still got a strong response, and near everyone hanging about in front of the stage after they finally got called time on.

Since the show had started late, and had its times slip further as DIY set times often do, Excrecor were pushed to start and pushed to close; when I checked on my phone at the end, it was well past 1 AM and I still had an hour and a half of driving to finish off...or so I thought. I hit the road, and found out to my chagrin that the connection from 290 to 90 was closed. Dead closed. The road needed the repairs, sure, and the full moon through the clouds was pretty awesome, but the detour around on back roads to go further south and then back north to switch to the other side of the highway and use that onramp added about 20 minutes to the trip. It was past 3 by the time I got home, but somehow I cycled, got to work without dying, and wrote all this up without passing out.


I'm on call this weekend, and thus probably at neither gig tomorrow; next is accordingly Dysentery at the Midway if I can swing it, or Abnormality at O'B's if not.