If you were in the BHS band or otherwise have seen the Blues Brothers movie several dozen times, you'll be content to just sing along with the post title ad infinitum. For everyone else, there are a hundred or so pictures from Korea, being the few pictures I was able to take when not at work at one of the world's most tightly media-controlled semiconductor fabs. This is a generally accurate depiction of Seoul, even though I don't hit a lot of normal tourist points.
1: Construction across the street from my hotel. While there's not quite so much as in Beijing, there's still a lot of building on going on in and around Seoul; it's just amazing how many new apartment buildings are going up everywhere.
2: Traffic interchange, also from the hotel. It's early in the morning, so there's not a whole lot of traffic on the roads. Later on, like when I had to go through it going to work (in a taxi; I'm sure I could drive Korea, but not all the time), it gets a lot more packed.
3: Road office. This jumble of beer, junk food, receipts, and way too many cell phones for any normal person follows me around the world and actually has to be a work environment in the rare case that there's no field office to operate out of. This was not, really.
4: Trees and cranes over the road next to the hotel. This probably looked better live, but now it works as a subtle statement about man and nature also.
5: Greenery, opposite. That this is photo-worthy tells you a lot about what this part of Seoul is like...and again, it's probably better live.
6: Inset tiles in the sidewalk leading up to the bridge over the river north. Cool stuff, and in good condition for the amount of foot traffic.
7: Shot across the river. I can't read the inscription on the rock, but the tower in the far background is the somewhat-famous Seoul TV tower.
8: How you know it's my kind of country. Serious. I did not, obviously, eat this pizza, but the very idea of a "garlic special" pizza is something to be respected. An entire nation of people who are OK with eating raw garlic; if I spoke the language I'd be preparing naturalization papers.
9a: South bank of the Han, part 1. I was trying to do a panorama shot, but the angles didn't line up at all.
9b: South bank of the Han, part 2. The floodplain left between the river and the road reminded me of similar land management on the Elbe in Dresden.
10: Downriver to the east. There are better shots of the distant building and the other bridge -- which I would cross back on -- later on.
11: Older Seoul, on the north side. These were among the first houses, as opposed to high-rises, that I'd seen in Seoul proper.
12: LOL KOREA LOL. If you know why this picture is funny, you spend too much time on the wrong parts of the internet. If you don't get it, there may be hope for you yet. CHEVY RUSH KEKEKEKE.
13: Modernistic Christian spire. South Korea is about the most Christianized nation in east Asia, at about 20-30 percent betwen various denominations. I didn't get any closer to this building and thus can't tell whether it's Catholic or Pentecostal.
14: Graffiti on a handrail. Korea is not a very graffitied country, and this is probably the most immediate example that I saw, on a rail on a footbridge across the street heading up towards Itaewon. No idea on a translation.
15: Barbed wire expressionism. If I'd gotten to Germany a decade earlier, I might have shot something like this around Dresden. As it is, this is the wall around the US Army motor pool across the street from their main complex entrance.
16: Shot into the US base. I was trying to get the signs in front of the guard shack, but at least I got the streetsign on the traffic lights.
17: The first, but not the last. Hines Ward endorses a bunch of other stuff in various places; this was just the most photographable. Somehow, I don't think that Martin Grammatica would get this much attention in Argentina even if he did something as noteworthy.
18: Itaewon arch. This shopping street is a proverbial hive of scum and villainy after dark, but I was cruising through on a Sunday morning, so the bars were closed and the hookers off the streets. There's a bunch of legitimate activity as well, but this street is about 200 yards from a large military base and was known as "Hooker Hill" even before the soldiers showed up. If I get sent back, I'll try to report on the night version and at least attempt to make it back alive.
19: Local information board, Itaewon. Some general information about the area; this is at 40% original dimensions (16% original area) so the English text is unreadable. Apology.
20: Pileups aren't just for HC shows. The way these houses stack up the hill towards the church just looks really neat.
21: Dome and more towers. Again, this is mostly just visually interesting. Most of "downtown" Seoul is actually north of Itaewon (the way the camera is pointed here), but you'd never know it with the way the hills dominate the landscape.
22: Trainer plane on the grounds of the War Museum. Why Koreans bother saving trainers will be explained later.
23: B-52 dwarfing everything else, same grounds. B-52s were never used in the Korean War, as they didn't enter service until '54 or '55, but we made so damn many of the things and it's so expensive to mod them to survive on a modern battlefield that the USAF probably just gave the surplus away to good homes as best they could after Vietnam.
24: The memorial stone of King Gwanggaeto. There's a caption shot for this later; I don't remember whether this is the original or a replica.
25: General-view shot of the Korean War memorial that dominates the front yard of the War Museum. The design recalls the symbolic landscaping of the US Vietnam Memorial while still blending in the expected statuary of a traditional monument. The design is really cool, but somewhat spoiled by putting APCs down in the bottom of the basin (carefully excluded to the right in this shot).
26: Memorial spire. The lighting was kind of bad on this, but there are reliefs running up the inside of the sectioned bronze pillar.
27: Explanation of the memorial. Unfortunately too small to read again; I'll check to see if the original has more readable text and transcribe.
28: Detail of the bronze statuary surrounding the spire. There are two flows of this, suggesting the yin-yang design of the Taeguk emblem, rounding after one another.
29: The other side. Walking up close to these is really chilling; the mass of metal presents a feeling of weight and immensity that drives the dynamism and movement of the overall design.
30: Full view, commemorative pillar (Greece). Several of these can be seen in shot 25 above; there's one for every foreign country that contributed personnel to the UN forces in the Korean War -- some of which may surprise you.
31: Ethiopia?!? Yes, once upon a time Ethiopia contributed troops to UN efforts rather than having them address issues in their own country. Troop levels were minimal (see later pictures), but they were there.
32: Colombia?!? Once upon a time, Colombia could send troops over to stabilize the international community, instead of having to keep them at home to fight gangsters and rebels...and needing American military intervention besides.
33: T-34 tank, doubtless restored since being captured. They also had a Sherman here, but I just need to drive about 5 miles up the road to see one of those.
34: Caption shot for shot 24. I'll transcribe this from the original if there's enough interest.
35: Three guesses what country this is. Countries with syllabic languages tend to misspell stuff, but by stripping out the parts that we don't pronounce in English anyways.
36: The US stele. As long as I'm shooting other countries, I had to shoot my own; despite the suicidal idiocy of some of the current government's policies, I'm still an American and still proud of the American idea.
37: The Statue of Brothers and supporting dome. Though the story behind it may be apocryphal and was certainly anticipated by the Armistead-Hancock saga (among, doubtless, hundreds of others) in the US Civil War, this memorial is still a uniquely touching reminder that for Korea, the Korean conflict wasn't about about ideology or geopolitics; it was and is a fratricidal and thus suicidal disaster that tore their country and their culture in two.
38: Caption shot for shot 37. This one is actually large enough to read...in English, the Japanese and Chinese are a little small.
39: Plate inside the dome under the statue. The inside of the dome has the real feeling of a tomb or chapel, and I was uncomfortable taking a lot of pictures.
40: Taeguk flag flying over the museum. Because there were some other people in the way, I didn't shoot the reliefs on either side of the stairs going in the front; on the right, there were the expected heroic depictions of ROK and UN soldiers, but on the left there were similarly syled figures that could only be NKPA and Chinese. Sooner or later, North Korea is going to give up and join the rest of the world, and when they do, united under this flag, they can also be proud of this building.
41: "Turtle Shaped Battleship". On the video there is footage of this craft (or another replica) actually sailing; the deck armor is really interesting.
42: Bronze artifacts. I forget what this shot was supposed to be demonstrating; from here on in, a lot of the pictures are shot with low-light settings and thus somewhat blurry.
43: what. Maybe the Chinese or the Japanese on this one makes sense, but the Engrish is completely out to lunch. (By the way, I would likely buy a rap album from Beat Mr. Wae, whether Korean or not.)
44: Bronze figurine. This was also originally a functional teakettle; pretty cool.
45: Traditional costume, middle ages. Mannequins in military uniform continue down to the present day in the rest of the museum.
46: Inscription on a medieval statue. As can be seen, this is in Chinese characters, which means that I or someone I know will eventually be able to pick out meaning despite not speaking Korean. This is one of the good things about an ideographic writing system, but it's a little degraded due to wear and low shutter speeds.
47: Tapestry, suggestive of the Bayeaux but a little later. There's an uneven approach to curation in this museum and I'm not certain that this is original.
47c: Caption of shot 47. Future caption shots will have no notes as they have little content.
48: Medieval Korean records, in bronze (reproductions, the original was a scroll that was necessarily destroyed in the transcription process -- the fragments still conserved), and a bound book. Again, written in hanzi/kanji.
49: The world's first Stalin Organ. This mobile multi-tube rocket launcher dates back to the 15th century.
49c: caption shot.
50: Crossbows, including a repeater (rear). Thanks a lot, Korea. Now I can no longer ban repeating crossbows from any games that I GM on the grounds that they don't exist.
50c: caption shot.
51: There's a fine balance between camouflage and usability. The leaves on the rearmost spear were probably great for hiding in a bamboo forest, but they're made of metal and would have cut the hell out of anyone trying to wield it.
52: Cannon arrow. Why fire a random rock when you can shoot a bore-perfect fin-stabilized projectile with a hull- or wall-piercing head and a shaft that's going to fragment into anyone standing nearby? There are a lot of smaller and larger examples of these, but none that I saw were fitted for an explosive warhead.
53: Large swords made normal by lack of scale. The Japanese-styled swords at the rear are between 5 and 6 feet long overall and seem to be at least reproductions of battlefield gear -- there were also obvious bearing swords in this area that were even larger. Thanks again, Korea; now I can't just rule out no-dachi either.
54: Another originalish painting. I don't know when perspective entered general use in east Asia, so I can't accurately date this.
55: Early modern machine gun. This is a multibarrel muzzleloader that could technically be rapid-fired by two people, I guess; the barrels are strung onto the backing bar like wind chimes.
56: Early-modern map of Korea. This is an original, and the first I saw here showing the whole country.
57: Japanese WWII surrender document_ This is an original, one of the several signed on the deck of the Missouri.
58: Counterfeit money and news articles on it. This is one of a series of cases on the runup to the start of the Korean War that should have made it obvious that the North Koreans were going to start something.
59: The Suicide Soldiers of Mt. Songak. In one of the first engagements of the Korean War, the NKPA crossed the line of demarcation and assaulted ROK positions; to drive the enemy out, these ten soldiers charged a key machine gun nest carrying 81mm mortar shells. Their sacrifice was successful, and this sculpture is moving, but it gets creepy a little later, because there are several more similar memorials to suicide squads later in the museum. (And one wonders why, if they had the mortar shells, they did not shoot them out their mortars -- there are terrain-dependent reasons why this might not be possible, but still.)
59c: caption shot.
60: ROK medic's kit from the Korean conflict. The picture, presumably of the medic who donated the kit, though this wasn't immediately clear from the exhibit, adds a human touch.
61: Little kid looking at other kids bayoneting and getting shot by NKPA. During the initial surge of the North Korean invasion, North Korean infantry assaulted a girls' middle school which was held by high-school- and college-age volunteers, which is now immortalized in this realistic and gory diorama. There is a didactic (or, cynically, propagandic) purpose to many of the exhibits here; this one should be obvious.
61c: caption shot. Since no mention is made of victory, the defenders were probably next to wiped out.
62: Personal effects of student volunteers. The enrollment of highschoolers (most student volunteers were college-age returnees from abroad, but there were others) should bring to mind the last days of the Confederacy (c.f. Richmond Greys) as symptomatic of a nation in extremis, which South Korea certainly was during the retreat to Busan.
63: Printing press and arms of ROK partisans. Koreans had a lot of experience from 40 years of being a Japanese colony to fall back on when the communists overran the south; much of this kit was probably just taken out of storage and the irregular units that had fought the Japanese just reformed.
64: Scribbles on paper. These are original battle plans of several ROK units from the Incheon landing, but half-century-old pencil on yellow paper doesn't photograph well in low light. Much cooler when you're there.
65: Various propaganda leaflets dropped on North Korea. Note Stalin pushing Mao pushing the poor NKPA private into the fire in the lower right.
66: Leaflets dropped on the UN forces. The shot is blurry enough that you can't really tell that the leaflet in the center isn't some ad cut from Life magazine of the day; the production values are really good.
67: Another leaflet. The Communist dialectic is obvious; Mr Big Business vacations in Florida while Joe Proletariat freezes his ass off under occasional fire at the Chosin Reservior.
68: Cross if you dare... Uniquely effective, as you cross into the exhibit on the UN surge, you also cross across the 38th parallel and into a world of thick green and unfamiliar noises; into the unknown, and you get the feeling wondering if you -- and by extension the UN forces -- should be there, invading as much as liberating. In the background, you can see a diorama of ROK soldiers filling their canteens on the south bank of the Yalu River (Chinese border for those who don't know the regional geography so well).
69: Red Army soldiers from the Chinese intervention. Further left out of the frame is another Chinese armed only with a pair of hand grenades; due to supply shortfalls, a lot of Chinese soldiers were just issued grenades and told to acquire a rifle off the enemy (or a PPsh off one of their comrades, like the guy on the far right) as soon as they were able to free one up. The human waves advance to the sound of flutes and gongs, as played by the two mannequins in front of the flag.
70: Machine gunner's shackle. To hold up the UN advance as long as possible, a North Korean machine gunner chained his leg to this iron staple and drove it into the ground. The will to not retreat meets the realistic assessment that the smart thing to do is probably to run the hell away like everyone else, and prevails.
71: Sign from the Military Demarcation Line. Unfortunately, due to poor planning, this was as close as I got the the DMZ. Bus tours run from Seoul daily -- it's like 30 miles north of the city, North Korean artillery could probably fire in right now without a lot of problems -- but I was too busy to schedule a slot in time.
72: Locations of the four invasion tunnels discovered so far, with dates of discovery. The dotted line on the map is the MDL/DMZ; the red blob in the lower center is the Seoul metropolitan area. It's a 20-minute bus ride from Seoul to the airport out in the other little blob labeled Incheon, and the closest point of the border is not much farther.
73: The UN joins in. Being the document of all countries involved in the "police action" taking place on the dates noted.
74: Breakdown of troop levels. With almost 2 million troops committed, the US did most of the fighting, but you probably didn't know that Turkey sent a full infantry brigade, or that there were seven thousand Filipinos and six thousand Thais on the ground as well. (Total commitment from Ethiopia and Colombia as noted before, 8618 soldiers combined.)
75: UN memorial. The hanging sculpture is composed of myriad dog tags to represent the soldiers lost.
76: Another trainer, suspended. We'll see in a moment why planes like this were important to the Korean War.
77: HALO parachutist. On the floor below you can see some of the scale models of military equipment and the placards describing them and their makers...who have names like Hyundai, Daewoo, and Samsung.
78: Divided nations faceoff. Though the light levels are too low and I had to get too far back to read the captions, those are ROK arms on the right, and on the left, typical weapons carried by the NVA. I was also surprised to learn that South Korea sent three infantry battalions to Vietnam, you're not alone.
79: Miscellaneous NVA/VC artifacts. A field doctor's manual is center; the metal object in the upper left is a tea kettle.
80: Random crap scavenged by ROK medical teams in Iraq. Koreans were there in Desert Storm. They were also there in Yugoslavia, they went to Georgia (former USSR, not current US) during the civil war there, they went to Somalia and Haiti, and they were in Afghanistan for Enduring Freedom. Whenever the UN or the US puts the balloon up, the South Koreans go, probably because they still feel in the world's debt for saving them from the North, but since the end of military rule, they tend to send medical support rather than combat forces. This still does not explain why they bring back the crappy bread that Saddam Hussein gave to his troops, and then preserve it and put it in a museum.
81: Relief celebrating the Korean armed forces. Few non-American democratic societies celebrate their armed forces the way that the Koreans celebrate theirs...though this may be the result of the fact that the armed forces are the reason that they are still democratic.
82: North Korean spy materials. The lists of numbers hogging the center of the frame are one-time pads used for cryptography and instantly identify the photographer as a computer geek, because the crypto kit is what is classified as most cool and interesting. :roll:
83: Cart as used by North Koreans in one of their invasion tunnels. The technology is crude and the bore of the tunnel (a reconstruction here, obviously) is small, but the NKPA did build other tunnels large enough to drive a tank through.
84: ROK air forces bombing from trainers. The explanation of all those unarmed junk planes hanging around a war museum. Due to a total lack of modern combat aircraft, the South Korean air force was forced to drop improvised bombs by hand out of unarmed and unarmored trainers to slow up the initial North Korean advance. It is one of the greatest testaments to individual ingenuity and bravery trumping organizational stupidity in modern military history. Seriously, you have a dissatisfied neighbor to the north glomming up all the Soviet Union's WWII-surplus hardware they can get their hands on, how the hell do you just decide not to have an air force??
84c: caption shot.
85: North Korean MiG-15. This was parked inside with a bunch of uninteresting APCs rather than outside, probably due to vandalism concerns.
86: Forend, same MiG-15.
87: National Defense Drum, main rotunda. This drum was marked as such but not explained in my museum guide. It still looks really cool.
88: War photography as macro bait. This was one of a long series of photographs showing the combat and devastation of the Korean War, just lined up on easels, but it was one of the few whose absurdity -- the intact tank angled as though ramming itself into the concrete wall of the other side of the ruined bridge -- really stuck out. You will probably be able to find this picture on the internet somewhere, but show a little respect as you cook up a lulztastic caption.
89: A rare example of Engul. This is more noteworthy because all the OTHER gates, RIGHT NEXT to this one, were marked correctly as WAY OUT. How does that even happen?
90: Ceremonial procession outside the War Museum. I'm not sure what this event was.
91: Procession again, slightly better view and lightly less HAET FURRINER. Seriously, go back to shot 90 and look at that guy in the lower left.
92: The procession advances.
93: Yes, that says what you think it says. All Korean males are required to serve in the military for two years. There are probably not too many of them, though, who can convince their fiancees that they ought to get married in the national war museum, even as traditionally Confucian as Korean society is.
94: North Korean minisub/speedboat. This was used in an intrusion attempt recent enough that I actually remember reading about it in the papers, and is now parked between some fontains here.
95: Flags of the UN participants. This is a good 'image shot' of the museum and grounds; behind me are a bunch of tanks, APCs, and SPGs with little kids climbing all over them that are just as valid an image shot, but less aesthetically pleasing.
96: Korean MP covering his face. This was about the only security-conscious thing this guy did over the minute or so I was watching him, and he only got his hands up because I had to punch in on him from across the street, then wait to shoot until the traffic cleared. There are plenty of police walking around on the sidewalk in front of the US base (which this guy is standing inside of) with four-foot riot-baton-cum-kendo-swords, but no actual threat from anything.
97: American soil, for now. The Us is giving this base back in a couple years, and I'm sure the soldiers who have to live there are glad, because a lot of the buildings look pretty crappy, old, and ill-maintained.
98: Wicker sculpture on a traffic island. Finally, an end to the drab and depressing war stuff! I was getting sick of it too when I got here, and a giant wicker dragon was just what the doctor ordered.
99: Seoul as normal East Asian city. The signs and the looping telephone wires cutting across them provided the visual complexity that caught my eye. I can recognize "world" in the middle of the Chinese sign in the upper right, but I don't know most of the other characters.
100: Old handcart in amid modern cars. It's like this was deliberately set up as a contrast of old and new, but this is obviously still a working cart, just set down while whoever owns it went to buy a drink or some cigarettes.
101: The new Seoul. Somehow, the rows on rows of high-rise apartments don't seem as depressing as those in the Hong Kong territories, maybe because I've been to China and know what real soulcrush looks like, maybe because they're just all over the place. If there's open land in this part of Korea, either it's a thirty-degree mountainside or someone is trying to build an apartment building on it.
102: Facade of the National Museum. I was thinking about going in, but it was late, I was beat, it was on the other side of a huge road, and I still had another 5 or so kilometers to walk to get back to my hotel. If I get sent back, I'll be sure to make it here as well as up to the DMZ.
103: Loltastic traffic sign. Sixty km/h speed limit? No swerving around other cars? What country do they think they're in?? This was on a ramp going up to the bridge over the river, so people did mostly obey it, but it's still really funny in the context of how people drive around Seoul.
104: Korean highway traffic. This is only a still photo of Seoul's answer to Storrow Drive, so you don't see the drivers taking it like you'd expect people to run Storrow Drive: going too fast and trying to get into every lane but the one they're in. As a Massachusetts driver, I would have felt right at home except for all the dimpled side panels and fenders I saw on the highways. "Ramming is how we say hello in Korea!"
105: Blue-arched bridge going south across the Han. Not quite a Blaues Wunder, but close; trains run in the section under the arch frame.
106: Golden skyscraper and park below. Pretty much just a postcard shot...except I couldn't get the sky to turn blue.
107. South bank towards the national cemetery. Just above one of the hills you can faintly see a plane coming in to Incheon.
108: Road in front of the national cemetery. This is a crop rather than a resize to show the detail of the sign in the center of the frame, and it really was kept pretty quiet.
109: National cemetery, terraced into the hillside. My camera batteries gave out after this shot -- too many long exposures in the museum -- so I wasn't able to shoot a couple interesting points on the way back to the hotel.
This is the end, so far; I'm not scheduled to go anywhere in the near future, but you never can tell.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Zircon with Frozen, Nocturnum, and Deconformity [Ralph's, Worcester, 5/3/2007]
Partly because this was a good bill on the first anniversary of Metal Thursday, and partly because I missed a fair number of shows while I was in Korea and will miss more this weekend due to other commitments, I made the longish and moderately strenuous drive out to Worcester to thrash it up. This isn't a general change, because getting home from a weekday show at 2:30 and waking up to go to work at 6:00 isn't something I can do on any kind of sustained basis, but for certain bills, the drive out to Worcester from the more populated parts of the state is eminently worth it. This definitely turned out to be one of them.
Deconformity [5/7]
Oddly enough, Deconformity also opened the first Metal Thursday back last year, which sets up commentary on the band: it shows that they're good and dedicated enough to stick around, but also that, in the dense New England scene, they still haven't differentiated themselves enough that a year later, they can go on somewhere besides first at Metal Thursday. Of course, this may not be wholly the band's fault; their CD got pushed back again, so there may be other factors at play keeping them from leveling at a faster pace. Regardless, the difference between this performance and the last time I saw them, up at Mark's with I think Enslaved, was enormous and obvious: having their bass player on hand really thickened up and unified their sound, setting up and giving context to the guitars. Where that earlier set came off as thin and tired, this one was dense and fully-developed, even if not all of the material was the most original. They played a fair degree of new material -- there's allegedly enough new tunes to do another full-length behind the one that got delayed again -- which mostly came off as a definite step up, so if they do end up releasing a double album, the second disc may have more attractions than the first, but anyone into brutal death metal is definitely going to dig, to some degree, everything that this band does at this point. A nice solid set, even though the vocals, bass, and drums cut in and out a couple times -- all together, as though they were being run through the same piece of hardware and that was having problems.
In between here I buzzed Jeremy's table and among other rarities from eastern Europe (including Silent Stream of Godless Elegy, who I'd been looking for for a while) legitimized one of my Drudkh albums; while this can be read to mean that one less person gets to randomly experience the pure awesomeness of Drudkh, the reality is that the band gets supported, and that at this point everyone who wants to hear Drudkh has already stolen all their albums from the internet, and are also among the ones trying not to seem too mental in grabbing the physical CDs out of the rack. Also, immediate Drudkh-grabbage is an unmissable clue to distro operators that they need to import more of this band, because there are few better inducements to metalheads to drop extra cash.
Nocturnum [5/7]
This was a night of firsts -- first local band announcing possible plans for a double-album (almost certainly a joke, but it'd be hell of cool if they actually did a limited double-CD release in addition to normal separate discs), first Rush cover at a local show I've been to, first Zircon cover done live (latter two explained later) -- and this band got into the act as well with the most material among them, being the first band I've seen locally playing d-drums. The sound actually wasn't too bad, which probably should be expected now as sampling bitrates and fidelity have improved significantly since the things were first introduced in the early '80s, and once the band got going it was almost impossible to tell that it was synth percussion rather than organic drums. The obvious benefits are that it's a lot less mass and volume for the same kit sound, and also that meth addicts aren't going to steal your cymbals to sell for scrap, but the cost of this kind of rig, even relative to a good normal drumkit, probably means that we aren't going to see a lot of local metal bands going digital. This band had a decent sound when it finally got dialed in, but it took almost half their set for the sound guy to get both guitars up to where they ought to have been; when the sound was dominated by the bass and keys, the efffect wasn't nearly as good as when all instruments were properly brought into balance. While they were pretty good once they got the sound problems (odd for this venue, Steve the sound guy is kind of a local legend in Worcester and almost always sets up great sound on the first go) ironed out, they did come off as a little unfocused at times; I'll have to see them again to tell whether this is a legitimate issue that the band's working on or just an artifact of a rough night for technical difficulties.
Frozen [6/7]
For this gig, Frozen came in 'uniform'; totally unplanned, all six band members showed up to the gig wearing Metallica shirts, which is so statistically bizarre that most people didn't notice it until it was pointed out -- your mind just blocks it off as impossible; "all six guys in an underground metal band showing up in Metallica kit? No, it can't be, that just doesn't happen." In contrast to the other times that I've seen them, the sound was rawer and thrashier on this outing, less transparently suggestive of Evergrey, but with still enough elements that it's pretty clear that the guitarists at least have The Inner Circle or maybe In Search of Truth. The performance was well-executed and well-finished, including their cover of "Tom Sawyer" alluded to above, which was pretty faithful but also not slavish in doing so; the effect of Alex Lifeson's guitar lines recast through distorted 7-strings was pretty cool, and it's safe to say this is one of the few places in the world where you'd see pileups and HC-style crowd vocals on a progressive rock song. This was about the best I've seen from this band, continuing the steady improvement, and I don't think too many people would have been unhappy with it as a headlining set.
Zircon [7/7]
Though this was the third time I've seen Zircon, it was the first time that they weren't packed onto a raft made of two shipping pallets wedged between pool tables and a merch stand; on a stage and doing a paid homestand rather than p2p at the back end of Mark's, Zircon took it up a notch as well, resulting in a completely dominating performance. There were parts that were merely excellently executed rather than transcendent, but the cumulative effect of almost a full hour of complete slaughter including a guest stint from their old guitarist and one of the best versions of "Pull The Plug" that I've heard from any band not including Chuck Schuldiner to close out the night definitely deserves top marks. Zircon also keeps getting better, and the traveling undercard of the Summer of Slaughter should watch out, because come July, they'll surely be even more of a force to be reckoned with.
Deconformity [5/7]
Oddly enough, Deconformity also opened the first Metal Thursday back last year, which sets up commentary on the band: it shows that they're good and dedicated enough to stick around, but also that, in the dense New England scene, they still haven't differentiated themselves enough that a year later, they can go on somewhere besides first at Metal Thursday. Of course, this may not be wholly the band's fault; their CD got pushed back again, so there may be other factors at play keeping them from leveling at a faster pace. Regardless, the difference between this performance and the last time I saw them, up at Mark's with I think Enslaved, was enormous and obvious: having their bass player on hand really thickened up and unified their sound, setting up and giving context to the guitars. Where that earlier set came off as thin and tired, this one was dense and fully-developed, even if not all of the material was the most original. They played a fair degree of new material -- there's allegedly enough new tunes to do another full-length behind the one that got delayed again -- which mostly came off as a definite step up, so if they do end up releasing a double album, the second disc may have more attractions than the first, but anyone into brutal death metal is definitely going to dig, to some degree, everything that this band does at this point. A nice solid set, even though the vocals, bass, and drums cut in and out a couple times -- all together, as though they were being run through the same piece of hardware and that was having problems.
In between here I buzzed Jeremy's table and among other rarities from eastern Europe (including Silent Stream of Godless Elegy, who I'd been looking for for a while) legitimized one of my Drudkh albums; while this can be read to mean that one less person gets to randomly experience the pure awesomeness of Drudkh, the reality is that the band gets supported, and that at this point everyone who wants to hear Drudkh has already stolen all their albums from the internet, and are also among the ones trying not to seem too mental in grabbing the physical CDs out of the rack. Also, immediate Drudkh-grabbage is an unmissable clue to distro operators that they need to import more of this band, because there are few better inducements to metalheads to drop extra cash.
Nocturnum [5/7]
This was a night of firsts -- first local band announcing possible plans for a double-album (almost certainly a joke, but it'd be hell of cool if they actually did a limited double-CD release in addition to normal separate discs), first Rush cover at a local show I've been to, first Zircon cover done live (latter two explained later) -- and this band got into the act as well with the most material among them, being the first band I've seen locally playing d-drums. The sound actually wasn't too bad, which probably should be expected now as sampling bitrates and fidelity have improved significantly since the things were first introduced in the early '80s, and once the band got going it was almost impossible to tell that it was synth percussion rather than organic drums. The obvious benefits are that it's a lot less mass and volume for the same kit sound, and also that meth addicts aren't going to steal your cymbals to sell for scrap, but the cost of this kind of rig, even relative to a good normal drumkit, probably means that we aren't going to see a lot of local metal bands going digital. This band had a decent sound when it finally got dialed in, but it took almost half their set for the sound guy to get both guitars up to where they ought to have been; when the sound was dominated by the bass and keys, the efffect wasn't nearly as good as when all instruments were properly brought into balance. While they were pretty good once they got the sound problems (odd for this venue, Steve the sound guy is kind of a local legend in Worcester and almost always sets up great sound on the first go) ironed out, they did come off as a little unfocused at times; I'll have to see them again to tell whether this is a legitimate issue that the band's working on or just an artifact of a rough night for technical difficulties.
Frozen [6/7]
For this gig, Frozen came in 'uniform'; totally unplanned, all six band members showed up to the gig wearing Metallica shirts, which is so statistically bizarre that most people didn't notice it until it was pointed out -- your mind just blocks it off as impossible; "all six guys in an underground metal band showing up in Metallica kit? No, it can't be, that just doesn't happen." In contrast to the other times that I've seen them, the sound was rawer and thrashier on this outing, less transparently suggestive of Evergrey, but with still enough elements that it's pretty clear that the guitarists at least have The Inner Circle or maybe In Search of Truth. The performance was well-executed and well-finished, including their cover of "Tom Sawyer" alluded to above, which was pretty faithful but also not slavish in doing so; the effect of Alex Lifeson's guitar lines recast through distorted 7-strings was pretty cool, and it's safe to say this is one of the few places in the world where you'd see pileups and HC-style crowd vocals on a progressive rock song. This was about the best I've seen from this band, continuing the steady improvement, and I don't think too many people would have been unhappy with it as a headlining set.
Zircon [7/7]
Though this was the third time I've seen Zircon, it was the first time that they weren't packed onto a raft made of two shipping pallets wedged between pool tables and a merch stand; on a stage and doing a paid homestand rather than p2p at the back end of Mark's, Zircon took it up a notch as well, resulting in a completely dominating performance. There were parts that were merely excellently executed rather than transcendent, but the cumulative effect of almost a full hour of complete slaughter including a guest stint from their old guitarist and one of the best versions of "Pull The Plug" that I've heard from any band not including Chuck Schuldiner to close out the night definitely deserves top marks. Zircon also keeps getting better, and the traveling undercard of the Summer of Slaughter should watch out, because come July, they'll surely be even more of a force to be reckoned with.
Metalfest (NEMHF) Report
New England Metal (Blade) and "Hardcore" Festival 2007
Worcester Palladium, 4/27/2007 and 4/28/2007
--
This is the rundown of this year's Metalfest; the snideness in the title is the result of the writer's inherently sarcastic nature rather than any real displeasure with the fest. This was a decent year, not as good as last, but not as bad as it could have been. There are probably two reasons for this.
First, last year was not merely great, but historically great in terms of lineup depth, drawing across all styles, running 3 full days, and gathering in a large number of bands from overseas. It was an expensive ticket, but worth it when it was considered that we got a lineup worthy of, say, Summer Breeze or With Full Force to do an indoor fest in North America that ran in the low four figures attendance-wise. This year was a step down, but still good, and very importantly a lot less expensive to put up. If Jabba the Scott (no disrespect intended, especially since he got Revocation on this year) took a hiding last year, it makes sense that he'd tighten his belt a little this year and do something like handing the second day (of only 2) over to Metal Blade. This is the second reason; while they do still have a bunch of good bands, I'm not entirely satisfied with the current direction of Metal Blade as a label. I recognize that it's difficult to survive as a record label in the present day, and if Job For A Cowboy's record sales help underwrite 3's recording and tour support, that's cool; the real issue is that if marketed properly, 3 could sell a ton of records on their own hook, and I still believe that labels have a responsibility to promote good music over crap that sells easily.
Of course, this is my definition of "good music" in play, and at this kind of festival I'm slipping out of the general population and into that upper tier of "cranky old men in kuttes who think everything (new) sucks". This is not precisely the case -- yet; give me another five years and I'm sure that I'll be insufferable if the band onstage isn't either Kreator or obviously ripping them off.
FRIDAY
or, God Damn It, Scott, Buy A God Damn Whiteboard
The weather for this weekend was wet, meaning that it was actually a good thing that I had a normal jacket on, not my kutte, while I was standing in line waiting for initial entry, which was forced by the fact that my hotel wasn't opening for check-in for another couple hours and I was squatting a space in a mini-mart parking lot. The line was a little shorter than last year, which mean that I actually got inside fairly close to the start of The Funeral Pyre's set.
The Funeral Pyre [5/7]
I was pleasantly surprised by the raw quality of this band's mix of black and death metal, especially going on so early on the second stage with a name that evokes the hordes of xYouthxCrewxRevivalx clones that are expected to pad the front of the bill at NEMHF. It just goes to show that you can't tell a book by its cover -- though in this case the band's Enslaved shirts did indicate that they were actually influenced by Enslaved. I didn't get to pick up their CD as a result of various antics trying to get my car off the street, but I will have to pick it up in the future.
Colin of Arabia [4/7]
Since I don't have a dominant interest in hardcore and didn't seek out the hardcore or alleged HC performances on the bill, I can't really comment on what proportion of the real hardcore at this festival this band represented. They were decent for their style, but while I often find hardcore intellectually interesting, I can't really bring myself to actually listen to it being played for any non-trivial amount of time. Those who are into this style or who were on the floor for it rather than up in the (sparsely populated) dealers' area buying the first installment of too many CDs from Oak Knoll would probably have enjoyed this set rather than simply appreciating it.
xDeathstarx [3.5/7]
The people who see commonalities between the rise in the early '80s of rap and thrash metal as racially divided responses to the same situation -- "urban blight music", in Peter Steele's words -- might want to take a look at the current generations of gangsta rap and toughguy hardcore: coming from someplace authentic, but often taking everything so far over the top as to make the result impossible to take seriously. This band fits the description, executing an average set of menacing but completely generic material while spreading the vocal load across three singers with approximately zero variance in style or range, and concluding their performance with an altar call. We've had Christian bands at Metalfest before, and while they weren't shy about declaring their beliefs, they kept it much more on the lines of "Jesus is there" rather than "come to Jesus". This is the first time I've actually seen a band laughed at at a gig; a significant portion of the second-stage crowd just cracked the hell up at the God promo. Musically, they were basically the same as any other random toughguy act, nothing special either way, but the instantiation of their Jesus-message was just laughable. (And yes, Nergal's rantings about how Behemoth hates Christians soooo much later at night were just as lame, so this isn't a religious discrimination issue.) God is Lulz.
Palehorse [4.5/7]
The main comment on this band in my notes is "When does it end?" which is not really fair; Palehorse is a toughguy hardcore band like many, many other toughguy hardcore bands on this bill, so while they were decent, they did kind of get caught in the undertow. My tolerance for extended exposure to this kind of music is kind of low, so if they'd been on a shorter local hardcore/thrash bill, I'd probably have liked this fairly decent set better.
Bloodlined Calligraphy [4/7]
Despite (or perhaps because of) their female singer, this band came off as yet another fairly generic hardcore band, with precious little particularly memorable about their set. Neither particularly good nor particularly bad, they didn't leave much of a strong impression, but they might have on someone who was either into this style or paying attention instead of wondering when the hell Revocation was going to go on, damnit.
At this point, those who have seen the schedule are going "Revo-who?", because Boston's best tech-thrash band is nowhere to be found on the programs. Well, welcome to the First Day of Metalfest Circus, in which the second-stage schedule gets it in the head with a shotgun and the organizers play Humpty Dumpty with it while not telling people who they're getting in to fill holes. What has been posted so far looks like the online schedule, but doesn't resemble at all what was posted on a single sheet of office paper next to the doors, let alone what was in the program. It surely would not kill the budget to get a whiteboard and write on it in magic marker who was playing when, then put it behind the second-stage bar where everyone could see it, and most people couldn't erase bits or draw penises on it. Revocation were a late add, and Scott could have hardly found better.
Revocation [6.5/7]
This wasn't their absolute best outing, but for a twenty-minute set from a complex and challenging band, it's difficult to ask for more. They pretty much played Summon The Spawn straight down, then closed with a sharp and cutting cover of "Symbolic" to complete the devastation. I hadn't heard this from them before, but it's Revocation covering Death, of course it's going to be good. They hopefully made a bunch of new fans as well as a good impression, but the confusion and anxiety they induced in the streams of kids leaving at the start may be more immediately satifying. Better that they'd stayed to experience the awesomeness, but it meant that I got up towards the front, and it's not as if everyone got Atheist on the first pass either. The hope is that, like 3 who was musically challenging and completely awesome early on the second stage last year, Revocation will get a decent slot on the main stage in the succeeding year as a followup.
Having seen Revocation, I could stop camping the second stage, go check in at my hotel, get some food and non-overpriced beer in, then come back in time to catch much of the metal portion of the main stage.
Still Remains [NR]
I got back in just at the end of their set, which they didn't announce as such, but which everyone was able to easily recognize because they were playing "The Worst Is Yet To Come". LOLZ WRIET ANOTEHR SONG BAND. I like this song, but I also have heard enough Still Remains to know that it's not sufficient to judge the band -- or any random performance of theirs -- by.
Despised Icon [5/7]
What do you call six Canucks -- sorry, five Canucks and a Masshole -- who can't decide whether they want to be Morbid Angel or Hatebreed? Replace the simple "?" with a ", Alex?", and you have a correct Jeopardy answer-question pair. Silliness aside, this was about the best performance that I've heard from Despised Icon, the most together and with the best sound, but while they've gotten their feet under them as a band, they now need to go out and do something with that foundation. Deathcore fans may be willing to take them as they are, and this set was pretty solid, but they showed enough talent here to demonstrate that they can do more than this -- as soon as they decide which direction they're going to move in, whether more death, more core, or forward to create something more distinctly their own.
Skinless [6/7]
I almost went up to Mark's to see Skinless on the Sunday following Metalfest, but didn't due to being sick and also because the last place you want to see Skinless is at a no-mosh venue. The snide thing to say is that they spend the time that they save by writing fairly simple death metal on thinking of new things for the audience to do, but this ignores the fact that Skinless is fun, if not very challenging, to listen to, and it's always a trip to see what they'll think of next. This time they had three "prepared" "mosh events"; first a normal but epically-sized circle pit that actually stayed going in a circle for a while rather than immediately breaking down into kung fu, then a few songs later their patented Tsunami of Death, and finally, at the end, the "zombie mosh", a full-floor Wall of Death done at a snail's pace against slow, brutal, riffage, which was one of the few times that the whole floor was actually moving. I wasn't down in among them, but watching the action and hearing the music was still plently cool.
Nachtmystium [6/7]
Black, thrashy, and grooving, this performance may or may not have been better than when I saw them at Mark's with 1349, but I definitely got more out of it due to being somewhere that I could actually hear them. Good stuff, and I'm going to have to get some of their records sooner rather than later.
Kataklysm [5/7]
This set focused on new music -- kind of hard not to, when you only get 20 minutes -- and as a result everyone was hugely into them...except one cranky old man in a kutte, who was standing on the first row above the floor grumbling to himself about how this was bullshit easy-listening-Kataklysm, and that they had no business hanging up their old logo and then not doing anything that could reasonably be described as hyperblast. Abstractly, Kataklysm did a solid and well-received set of mosh-friendly brutal death metal. Subjectively, this was easy-listening sellout bullshit that stomped all over the legacy of their old material with football boots, but this is hardly anything new. I feel bad for anyone into only their new material who bought Sorcery, like I did, from the CM table, but without knowing what's on it and then either crying as they get their ears spiked or becoming immensely disappointed with the band's current direction.
3 Inches of Blood [5/7]
The jury is still out on whether this band is a gag or not, or if they ever were, but regardless, they're a fun time, and they put together a solid set here. If hardcore was a template that you could add to various kinds of music rather than a genre of its own, this would be what you'd get on applying hardcore to power metal. As yet, there's no genre for this, but all that means is that 3 Inches of Blood don't have any competition (yet...still waiting for Volatile to record something), and fortunately this hasn't really induced them to slack off.
Walls of Jericho [4.5/7]
Before getting into this review, note that I went into this band's set with an open mind and did not have any existing prejudice against them for being from Ypsi. If I hadn't gotten a cheap apartment within walking distance of the Engineering campus while I was at Michigan, I'd have lived in Ypsilanti too.
That being said, if this band had a dude singer rather than a chick, nobody would care about them. Actually, they might still be a big deal, but this doesn't mean that they should be; there's just no accounting for taste when it comes to absolutely, totally generic metalcore. Most of the set was well-delivered enough, but the wheels came off over the last few songs to a certain degree; they need to get it together as well as come up with something to hang their hat on as a band other than their vocalist's gender, because otherwise they're going to be rapidly lapped and forgotten by the next wave of generic hardcore/metalcore bands with chick singers.
Devildriver [5/7]
Other people have been convinced somehow that Dez has seen the light and turned away from the darkness, but on the basis of this set, what he's done is salvage the rolling chassis of nu-metal and rebuild it into something worthwhile rather than doing something new from the ground up. This set was definitely more metal than nu, but in a wide sense could still be described as nu-metal and a little more narrowly as kinda boring. Respect is due, though, for coming out strongly against the pit ninjas, telling them to go back to the karate dojo if they want to kung fu fight, and just let people in the pit mosh. Maybe it's that we're both old farts at this point, but definitely, respect as well as lulz.
Bury Your Dead [5/7]
Though I hadn't seen this band before, they basically fulfilled expectations: strong and competently delivered brutal hardcore, but also fairly one-dimensional. There's only so far that passion and dedication will carry you, and this distance is right up to the point where people realize how silly it is that your biggest hit involves screaming your band's name over and over while the audience throws themselves into a pigpile in front of the stage. There's a fine line between clever and stupid, and we all think we're on the 'clever' side while other people are laughing up their sleeves and placing us in the second caption. BYD was entertaining, but unfortunately tough to take seriously without a large grain of salt.
Behemoth [5/7]
This was a nice set, and at least more visually black metal than the last time that they were around -- I can't recall whether they were corpsepainted when they came around with Morbid Angel, but they were this time -- but this is still, at least from my lookout, a fairly mediocre band; just good enough that some people wanted an encore, but not good enough that many people were disappointed when they didn't do one. I was glad for my part; I had heard quite enough Behemoth for one night and had a riddle to crack.
There is a riff in "Conquer All" taken directly from one of the few good or memorable songs that Morgana Lefay ever wrote; the riddle was in figuring out that it was from Lefay that I'd first heard this riff. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the stomach to listen through Maleficarum again to figure out which song in particular it was. (A quick look at metal-archives found that the lyrics matched the title track, one of the few good ones, again.) Weird as all hell, and I have no idea how Nergal found it given his supposed tastes (though there weren't many in the Polish underground in the late '90s who had a lot of respect for him); probably a re-invention at this point.
Dimmu Borgir [6.5/7]
This was a really well-staged and well-executed performance, but Dimmu's material isn't, overall, good enough to merit a top score. Regardless, it was a hell of an entertaining set, and at least Shagrath has finally ditched that ratty bathrobe that he used to wear all the time. At times, the visual aspect seemed creepily like Judas Priest, which may not be a bad thing; Dimmu Borgir has long since lost all credence and standing with the true kvlts, so they might as well bring their symphonic black metal attack to the largest possible audience by taking on a more universally-appealing and nostalgically-resonating image. It's still good music, just not especially true any more...if it ever was.
SATURDAY
or, No, We Are Not Just A Metalcore Label, Look At These Good Bands We Still Have
So after getting a good dose of schadenfreude watching the emo QB from Notre Dame squirm on the verge of tears because nobody'd drafted him yet, I headed over for Metal Blade day, with anticipation (3 and Cannibal Corpse) as well as trepidation (many other bands), because Metal Blade quite obviously isn't exactly what it once was.
The Destro [4/7]
This bunch was from Dallas, but it's really difficult to tell how you'd know that without being told; their sound is basically the same kind of brutal hardcore/metalcore that we see all the time locally in New England. It had its good points, and admittedly I was on my final scalping of the dealers' tables at the time, but overall it did come off as somewhat generic.
Jacket now thoroughly packed with CDs, I headed downstairs to see what Metal Blade had set up as headliners.
Shai Hulud [5/7]
The performance was pretty good (even though this band's material has been described in the past as "everything about '90s hardcore that needed a bullet in the head and a shallow grave"), and the oddly-somewhat-sparse crowd dug them, but it's not as though we haven't all heard this kind of material before. I missed Beyond The Embrace and Hallows Eve, but this was a decent enough start to the main stage for me.
3 [7/7]
As last year, this was simply a superb performance, though with a little more guitar firepower (both flamenco and conventional metal styles) and a few minor difficulties with the drum/percussion solo than the last time I saw them. The overall effect was still as stellar, with the only difference being that there were a hell of a lot more people standing around being impressed this time. There are not nearly enough bands like this, in metal or out, and if you like great music, they, like Pelican, should definitely be on your short list to check out.
Goatwhore [6/7]
Oh, Goatwhore. It just wouldn't be a metal show without them, and I'm surprised that they didn't find some way to get onto the first day as well. This was one of the better sets I've seen from them, and they definitely seemed a little better adjusted to this stage than the last time I saw them here, with Celtic Frost back in November. Five-plus months of constant touring will all kinds of bands over all kinds of venues will do that for you. A nice set, but you're likely to see a similar or better one from them within three weeks...no matter where you are...and then another one three weeks after that...
Impious [6/7]
I hadn't heard or really heard of this band prior to seeing them, and now I'm mad at myself for this fact. No pretensions, just a damn, damn good set of solid NWOSDM-driven thrash fuckin' metal. Kickass; just hope that they come around soon with a tour where they'll get more than 20 minutes to show off.
God Dethroned [5/7]
People besides me were calling out for their older material, but they focused principally on the new stuff; while kind of a bummer, this is unsurprising, as playing, say, "Soulcapture 1562", would leave approximately no room for anything else in a 20-minute set (sure 11 minutes, but when 20's all you get, every minute counts), and the new stuff is solid as well. It was at this point that I started to feel the effects of whatever virus I picked up while my system was surpressed from jetlag, exhaustion, and mild food poisoning, and at several points I literally was falling asleep on my feet -- while listening to live black/death blasting, natch.
Lizzy Borden [5/7]
I had not seen this band live before, but I'd heard enough of their material to wonder why in the hell Lizzy thought it was still worth trying to have a career. The answer is that the stage antics around the music are at least somewhat entertaining: the short definition of this band's style is "prop comedy of NWOBHM", and if that doesn't suggest "entertaining but played out", nothing will. The music was decent most of the time, but the gimmicks were often pretty much half-assed, like King Diamond without a budget for blood capsules. They didn't seem to be too happy with the crowd's less-than-exuberant reaction, but still hammed it up at the end like they'd just blown them out of their seats with a triple-encore at Madison Square Garden or Hammersmith. Metal Blade was filming this for a DVD, so my guess is that they were hoping the crowd would be brought up in post. For the historical record, NEMHF cheered these guys in accord with the quality of their performance, but any kind of "going wild" is false representation.
Job For A Cowboy [4/7]
This band more than any other illustrates the divide between the old and the new internet, because since Trey Azagthoth was too busy doing Sailor Moon RPG chats with his Quake-clan buddies over IRC, JFAC was able to eat his lunch by whoring themselves on Myspace. Generic in concept and execution, they would probably still have put me to sleep even if I hadn't been sick at the time, and everything they do that's actually good is done much better by other bands. In the last analysis, JFAC is a much less-inspired, less-interesting clone of Morbid Angel that unexplainably a bunch of 12-year-olds are into. This may not be the popular opinion, but it does happen to be TRUE. :P
The Red Chord [7/7]
This is the first proper set I've seen from this band (they did a three-song fix-the-schedule fill-in at last year's fest), and damn if they weren't absolutely impressive. They brought a tremendous amount of thrash sophistication and complexity without losing the power and directness of their hardcore roots, creating probably the optimium single set for this festival, reminding people that the idea of 'metalcore' need not be solely the wasteland that it's become since becoming popular. Great stuff, and maybe now I can finally persuade myself to buy some of their records -- I should have listened to Kreider and gotten into them back in '01 and '02.
The Black Dahlia Murder [6/7]
I have absolutely no idea how this band continues to do such killer live sets yet suck so relentlessly hard on record. The total effect of their performance was pretty much the same as the other two times I've seen them, both in this hall; we'll see how well they adapt to the Party Stage this summer as far as variance goes. Somehow, the power of their delivery pushes the material that comes off as so pedestrian on CD, and so it's hard to think of someone who'd really react negatively to this set.
Unfortunately, I was in no condition to continue on for the last three acts of the night. I wanted strongly to see Cannibal Corpse, but I'm seeing them at Wacken this summer, so it wasn't worth turning myself into one of their album covers to stick around for their set. And then, of course, there was no motivation to survive Unearth and make it to the "special guest jam"; people had been rumoring about Sacred Reich and Slayer, but Slayer is an active band, so you can see them sometime else, and Sacred Reich is also on the Wacken bill, so even if this had been how it went, I wouldn't have felt bad missing it. CC with Barnes? Also not interesting, and it also didn't happen; the only way I would have legitimately felt bad about not staying for this alleged once-in-a-lifetime event is if they somehow got Cirith Ungol back together to play down Frost & Fire. Metal Blade being what it is now, I was pretty confident that this wasn't going to happen -- and it didn't, though maybe sometime in the future NEMHF will be big enough to do the "cash offer you can't refuse" to get bands back together like Wacken and other top Euro fests regularly put up (the famous rumors of a million-euro guarantee for a Carcass reunion are probably fiction, but probably not far off the mark).
All in all, this was a good festival, though not great, but if all festivals were great, the standard would just be raised. This year was hurt greatly by several bands cancelling late; Cellador scratched due to illness, I Killed The Prom Queen and Abigail Williams broke up, and Satyricon couldn't get visas due to past criminal behavior. While I don't much miss many of the above (only Satyricon, and better to try and see them somewhere where Fenriz and Nocturno Culto may come out to play a few "covers"), the cancellations played hell with the schedule and enhanced the atmosphere of pure chaos that often seems to surround the fest. After the super-A-list lineup of last year, this two-day version has to feel like a letdown, but it's really just coming back to earth; as always, there's the hope that next year the scheduling will be tighter, the overall lineup quality a little better, and a little more real metal and real hardcore instead of just all metalcore, all the time, and it's realistic to believe that this step can be made from this year, while last year's was really too good to be sustained. Contrary to what might be implied from a lot of the commentary on the Saturday headliners, I did have a good time at this fest, met a bunch of cool people, and stuffed my ears and jacket with a bunch of good music. NEMHF is at least on the short list of the best festivals in North America, and we in New England are fortunate that it's right where we live.
Worcester Palladium, 4/27/2007 and 4/28/2007
--
This is the rundown of this year's Metalfest; the snideness in the title is the result of the writer's inherently sarcastic nature rather than any real displeasure with the fest. This was a decent year, not as good as last, but not as bad as it could have been. There are probably two reasons for this.
First, last year was not merely great, but historically great in terms of lineup depth, drawing across all styles, running 3 full days, and gathering in a large number of bands from overseas. It was an expensive ticket, but worth it when it was considered that we got a lineup worthy of, say, Summer Breeze or With Full Force to do an indoor fest in North America that ran in the low four figures attendance-wise. This year was a step down, but still good, and very importantly a lot less expensive to put up. If Jabba the Scott (no disrespect intended, especially since he got Revocation on this year) took a hiding last year, it makes sense that he'd tighten his belt a little this year and do something like handing the second day (of only 2) over to Metal Blade. This is the second reason; while they do still have a bunch of good bands, I'm not entirely satisfied with the current direction of Metal Blade as a label. I recognize that it's difficult to survive as a record label in the present day, and if Job For A Cowboy's record sales help underwrite 3's recording and tour support, that's cool; the real issue is that if marketed properly, 3 could sell a ton of records on their own hook, and I still believe that labels have a responsibility to promote good music over crap that sells easily.
Of course, this is my definition of "good music" in play, and at this kind of festival I'm slipping out of the general population and into that upper tier of "cranky old men in kuttes who think everything (new) sucks". This is not precisely the case -- yet; give me another five years and I'm sure that I'll be insufferable if the band onstage isn't either Kreator or obviously ripping them off.
FRIDAY
or, God Damn It, Scott, Buy A God Damn Whiteboard
The weather for this weekend was wet, meaning that it was actually a good thing that I had a normal jacket on, not my kutte, while I was standing in line waiting for initial entry, which was forced by the fact that my hotel wasn't opening for check-in for another couple hours and I was squatting a space in a mini-mart parking lot. The line was a little shorter than last year, which mean that I actually got inside fairly close to the start of The Funeral Pyre's set.
The Funeral Pyre [5/7]
I was pleasantly surprised by the raw quality of this band's mix of black and death metal, especially going on so early on the second stage with a name that evokes the hordes of xYouthxCrewxRevivalx clones that are expected to pad the front of the bill at NEMHF. It just goes to show that you can't tell a book by its cover -- though in this case the band's Enslaved shirts did indicate that they were actually influenced by Enslaved. I didn't get to pick up their CD as a result of various antics trying to get my car off the street, but I will have to pick it up in the future.
Colin of Arabia [4/7]
Since I don't have a dominant interest in hardcore and didn't seek out the hardcore or alleged HC performances on the bill, I can't really comment on what proportion of the real hardcore at this festival this band represented. They were decent for their style, but while I often find hardcore intellectually interesting, I can't really bring myself to actually listen to it being played for any non-trivial amount of time. Those who are into this style or who were on the floor for it rather than up in the (sparsely populated) dealers' area buying the first installment of too many CDs from Oak Knoll would probably have enjoyed this set rather than simply appreciating it.
xDeathstarx [3.5/7]
The people who see commonalities between the rise in the early '80s of rap and thrash metal as racially divided responses to the same situation -- "urban blight music", in Peter Steele's words -- might want to take a look at the current generations of gangsta rap and toughguy hardcore: coming from someplace authentic, but often taking everything so far over the top as to make the result impossible to take seriously. This band fits the description, executing an average set of menacing but completely generic material while spreading the vocal load across three singers with approximately zero variance in style or range, and concluding their performance with an altar call. We've had Christian bands at Metalfest before, and while they weren't shy about declaring their beliefs, they kept it much more on the lines of "Jesus is there" rather than "come to Jesus". This is the first time I've actually seen a band laughed at at a gig; a significant portion of the second-stage crowd just cracked the hell up at the God promo. Musically, they were basically the same as any other random toughguy act, nothing special either way, but the instantiation of their Jesus-message was just laughable. (And yes, Nergal's rantings about how Behemoth hates Christians soooo much later at night were just as lame, so this isn't a religious discrimination issue.) God is Lulz.
Palehorse [4.5/7]
The main comment on this band in my notes is "When does it end?" which is not really fair; Palehorse is a toughguy hardcore band like many, many other toughguy hardcore bands on this bill, so while they were decent, they did kind of get caught in the undertow. My tolerance for extended exposure to this kind of music is kind of low, so if they'd been on a shorter local hardcore/thrash bill, I'd probably have liked this fairly decent set better.
Bloodlined Calligraphy [4/7]
Despite (or perhaps because of) their female singer, this band came off as yet another fairly generic hardcore band, with precious little particularly memorable about their set. Neither particularly good nor particularly bad, they didn't leave much of a strong impression, but they might have on someone who was either into this style or paying attention instead of wondering when the hell Revocation was going to go on, damnit.
At this point, those who have seen the schedule are going "Revo-who?", because Boston's best tech-thrash band is nowhere to be found on the programs. Well, welcome to the First Day of Metalfest Circus, in which the second-stage schedule gets it in the head with a shotgun and the organizers play Humpty Dumpty with it while not telling people who they're getting in to fill holes. What has been posted so far looks like the online schedule, but doesn't resemble at all what was posted on a single sheet of office paper next to the doors, let alone what was in the program. It surely would not kill the budget to get a whiteboard and write on it in magic marker who was playing when, then put it behind the second-stage bar where everyone could see it, and most people couldn't erase bits or draw penises on it. Revocation were a late add, and Scott could have hardly found better.
Revocation [6.5/7]
This wasn't their absolute best outing, but for a twenty-minute set from a complex and challenging band, it's difficult to ask for more. They pretty much played Summon The Spawn straight down, then closed with a sharp and cutting cover of "Symbolic" to complete the devastation. I hadn't heard this from them before, but it's Revocation covering Death, of course it's going to be good. They hopefully made a bunch of new fans as well as a good impression, but the confusion and anxiety they induced in the streams of kids leaving at the start may be more immediately satifying. Better that they'd stayed to experience the awesomeness, but it meant that I got up towards the front, and it's not as if everyone got Atheist on the first pass either. The hope is that, like 3 who was musically challenging and completely awesome early on the second stage last year, Revocation will get a decent slot on the main stage in the succeeding year as a followup.
Having seen Revocation, I could stop camping the second stage, go check in at my hotel, get some food and non-overpriced beer in, then come back in time to catch much of the metal portion of the main stage.
Still Remains [NR]
I got back in just at the end of their set, which they didn't announce as such, but which everyone was able to easily recognize because they were playing "The Worst Is Yet To Come". LOLZ WRIET ANOTEHR SONG BAND. I like this song, but I also have heard enough Still Remains to know that it's not sufficient to judge the band -- or any random performance of theirs -- by.
Despised Icon [5/7]
What do you call six Canucks -- sorry, five Canucks and a Masshole -- who can't decide whether they want to be Morbid Angel or Hatebreed? Replace the simple "?" with a ", Alex?", and you have a correct Jeopardy answer-question pair. Silliness aside, this was about the best performance that I've heard from Despised Icon, the most together and with the best sound, but while they've gotten their feet under them as a band, they now need to go out and do something with that foundation. Deathcore fans may be willing to take them as they are, and this set was pretty solid, but they showed enough talent here to demonstrate that they can do more than this -- as soon as they decide which direction they're going to move in, whether more death, more core, or forward to create something more distinctly their own.
Skinless [6/7]
I almost went up to Mark's to see Skinless on the Sunday following Metalfest, but didn't due to being sick and also because the last place you want to see Skinless is at a no-mosh venue. The snide thing to say is that they spend the time that they save by writing fairly simple death metal on thinking of new things for the audience to do, but this ignores the fact that Skinless is fun, if not very challenging, to listen to, and it's always a trip to see what they'll think of next. This time they had three "prepared" "mosh events"; first a normal but epically-sized circle pit that actually stayed going in a circle for a while rather than immediately breaking down into kung fu, then a few songs later their patented Tsunami of Death, and finally, at the end, the "zombie mosh", a full-floor Wall of Death done at a snail's pace against slow, brutal, riffage, which was one of the few times that the whole floor was actually moving. I wasn't down in among them, but watching the action and hearing the music was still plently cool.
Nachtmystium [6/7]
Black, thrashy, and grooving, this performance may or may not have been better than when I saw them at Mark's with 1349, but I definitely got more out of it due to being somewhere that I could actually hear them. Good stuff, and I'm going to have to get some of their records sooner rather than later.
Kataklysm [5/7]
This set focused on new music -- kind of hard not to, when you only get 20 minutes -- and as a result everyone was hugely into them...except one cranky old man in a kutte, who was standing on the first row above the floor grumbling to himself about how this was bullshit easy-listening-Kataklysm, and that they had no business hanging up their old logo and then not doing anything that could reasonably be described as hyperblast. Abstractly, Kataklysm did a solid and well-received set of mosh-friendly brutal death metal. Subjectively, this was easy-listening sellout bullshit that stomped all over the legacy of their old material with football boots, but this is hardly anything new. I feel bad for anyone into only their new material who bought Sorcery, like I did, from the CM table, but without knowing what's on it and then either crying as they get their ears spiked or becoming immensely disappointed with the band's current direction.
3 Inches of Blood [5/7]
The jury is still out on whether this band is a gag or not, or if they ever were, but regardless, they're a fun time, and they put together a solid set here. If hardcore was a template that you could add to various kinds of music rather than a genre of its own, this would be what you'd get on applying hardcore to power metal. As yet, there's no genre for this, but all that means is that 3 Inches of Blood don't have any competition (yet...still waiting for Volatile to record something), and fortunately this hasn't really induced them to slack off.
Walls of Jericho [4.5/7]
Before getting into this review, note that I went into this band's set with an open mind and did not have any existing prejudice against them for being from Ypsi. If I hadn't gotten a cheap apartment within walking distance of the Engineering campus while I was at Michigan, I'd have lived in Ypsilanti too.
That being said, if this band had a dude singer rather than a chick, nobody would care about them. Actually, they might still be a big deal, but this doesn't mean that they should be; there's just no accounting for taste when it comes to absolutely, totally generic metalcore. Most of the set was well-delivered enough, but the wheels came off over the last few songs to a certain degree; they need to get it together as well as come up with something to hang their hat on as a band other than their vocalist's gender, because otherwise they're going to be rapidly lapped and forgotten by the next wave of generic hardcore/metalcore bands with chick singers.
Devildriver [5/7]
Other people have been convinced somehow that Dez has seen the light and turned away from the darkness, but on the basis of this set, what he's done is salvage the rolling chassis of nu-metal and rebuild it into something worthwhile rather than doing something new from the ground up. This set was definitely more metal than nu, but in a wide sense could still be described as nu-metal and a little more narrowly as kinda boring. Respect is due, though, for coming out strongly against the pit ninjas, telling them to go back to the karate dojo if they want to kung fu fight, and just let people in the pit mosh. Maybe it's that we're both old farts at this point, but definitely, respect as well as lulz.
Bury Your Dead [5/7]
Though I hadn't seen this band before, they basically fulfilled expectations: strong and competently delivered brutal hardcore, but also fairly one-dimensional. There's only so far that passion and dedication will carry you, and this distance is right up to the point where people realize how silly it is that your biggest hit involves screaming your band's name over and over while the audience throws themselves into a pigpile in front of the stage. There's a fine line between clever and stupid, and we all think we're on the 'clever' side while other people are laughing up their sleeves and placing us in the second caption. BYD was entertaining, but unfortunately tough to take seriously without a large grain of salt.
Behemoth [5/7]
This was a nice set, and at least more visually black metal than the last time that they were around -- I can't recall whether they were corpsepainted when they came around with Morbid Angel, but they were this time -- but this is still, at least from my lookout, a fairly mediocre band; just good enough that some people wanted an encore, but not good enough that many people were disappointed when they didn't do one. I was glad for my part; I had heard quite enough Behemoth for one night and had a riddle to crack.
There is a riff in "Conquer All" taken directly from one of the few good or memorable songs that Morgana Lefay ever wrote; the riddle was in figuring out that it was from Lefay that I'd first heard this riff. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the stomach to listen through Maleficarum again to figure out which song in particular it was. (A quick look at metal-archives found that the lyrics matched the title track, one of the few good ones, again.) Weird as all hell, and I have no idea how Nergal found it given his supposed tastes (though there weren't many in the Polish underground in the late '90s who had a lot of respect for him); probably a re-invention at this point.
Dimmu Borgir [6.5/7]
This was a really well-staged and well-executed performance, but Dimmu's material isn't, overall, good enough to merit a top score. Regardless, it was a hell of an entertaining set, and at least Shagrath has finally ditched that ratty bathrobe that he used to wear all the time. At times, the visual aspect seemed creepily like Judas Priest, which may not be a bad thing; Dimmu Borgir has long since lost all credence and standing with the true kvlts, so they might as well bring their symphonic black metal attack to the largest possible audience by taking on a more universally-appealing and nostalgically-resonating image. It's still good music, just not especially true any more...if it ever was.
SATURDAY
or, No, We Are Not Just A Metalcore Label, Look At These Good Bands We Still Have
So after getting a good dose of schadenfreude watching the emo QB from Notre Dame squirm on the verge of tears because nobody'd drafted him yet, I headed over for Metal Blade day, with anticipation (3 and Cannibal Corpse) as well as trepidation (many other bands), because Metal Blade quite obviously isn't exactly what it once was.
The Destro [4/7]
This bunch was from Dallas, but it's really difficult to tell how you'd know that without being told; their sound is basically the same kind of brutal hardcore/metalcore that we see all the time locally in New England. It had its good points, and admittedly I was on my final scalping of the dealers' tables at the time, but overall it did come off as somewhat generic.
Jacket now thoroughly packed with CDs, I headed downstairs to see what Metal Blade had set up as headliners.
Shai Hulud [5/7]
The performance was pretty good (even though this band's material has been described in the past as "everything about '90s hardcore that needed a bullet in the head and a shallow grave"), and the oddly-somewhat-sparse crowd dug them, but it's not as though we haven't all heard this kind of material before. I missed Beyond The Embrace and Hallows Eve, but this was a decent enough start to the main stage for me.
3 [7/7]
As last year, this was simply a superb performance, though with a little more guitar firepower (both flamenco and conventional metal styles) and a few minor difficulties with the drum/percussion solo than the last time I saw them. The overall effect was still as stellar, with the only difference being that there were a hell of a lot more people standing around being impressed this time. There are not nearly enough bands like this, in metal or out, and if you like great music, they, like Pelican, should definitely be on your short list to check out.
Goatwhore [6/7]
Oh, Goatwhore. It just wouldn't be a metal show without them, and I'm surprised that they didn't find some way to get onto the first day as well. This was one of the better sets I've seen from them, and they definitely seemed a little better adjusted to this stage than the last time I saw them here, with Celtic Frost back in November. Five-plus months of constant touring will all kinds of bands over all kinds of venues will do that for you. A nice set, but you're likely to see a similar or better one from them within three weeks...no matter where you are...and then another one three weeks after that...
Impious [6/7]
I hadn't heard or really heard of this band prior to seeing them, and now I'm mad at myself for this fact. No pretensions, just a damn, damn good set of solid NWOSDM-driven thrash fuckin' metal. Kickass; just hope that they come around soon with a tour where they'll get more than 20 minutes to show off.
God Dethroned [5/7]
People besides me were calling out for their older material, but they focused principally on the new stuff; while kind of a bummer, this is unsurprising, as playing, say, "Soulcapture 1562", would leave approximately no room for anything else in a 20-minute set (sure 11 minutes, but when 20's all you get, every minute counts), and the new stuff is solid as well. It was at this point that I started to feel the effects of whatever virus I picked up while my system was surpressed from jetlag, exhaustion, and mild food poisoning, and at several points I literally was falling asleep on my feet -- while listening to live black/death blasting, natch.
Lizzy Borden [5/7]
I had not seen this band live before, but I'd heard enough of their material to wonder why in the hell Lizzy thought it was still worth trying to have a career. The answer is that the stage antics around the music are at least somewhat entertaining: the short definition of this band's style is "prop comedy of NWOBHM", and if that doesn't suggest "entertaining but played out", nothing will. The music was decent most of the time, but the gimmicks were often pretty much half-assed, like King Diamond without a budget for blood capsules. They didn't seem to be too happy with the crowd's less-than-exuberant reaction, but still hammed it up at the end like they'd just blown them out of their seats with a triple-encore at Madison Square Garden or Hammersmith. Metal Blade was filming this for a DVD, so my guess is that they were hoping the crowd would be brought up in post. For the historical record, NEMHF cheered these guys in accord with the quality of their performance, but any kind of "going wild" is false representation.
Job For A Cowboy [4/7]
This band more than any other illustrates the divide between the old and the new internet, because since Trey Azagthoth was too busy doing Sailor Moon RPG chats with his Quake-clan buddies over IRC, JFAC was able to eat his lunch by whoring themselves on Myspace. Generic in concept and execution, they would probably still have put me to sleep even if I hadn't been sick at the time, and everything they do that's actually good is done much better by other bands. In the last analysis, JFAC is a much less-inspired, less-interesting clone of Morbid Angel that unexplainably a bunch of 12-year-olds are into. This may not be the popular opinion, but it does happen to be TRUE. :P
The Red Chord [7/7]
This is the first proper set I've seen from this band (they did a three-song fix-the-schedule fill-in at last year's fest), and damn if they weren't absolutely impressive. They brought a tremendous amount of thrash sophistication and complexity without losing the power and directness of their hardcore roots, creating probably the optimium single set for this festival, reminding people that the idea of 'metalcore' need not be solely the wasteland that it's become since becoming popular. Great stuff, and maybe now I can finally persuade myself to buy some of their records -- I should have listened to Kreider and gotten into them back in '01 and '02.
The Black Dahlia Murder [6/7]
I have absolutely no idea how this band continues to do such killer live sets yet suck so relentlessly hard on record. The total effect of their performance was pretty much the same as the other two times I've seen them, both in this hall; we'll see how well they adapt to the Party Stage this summer as far as variance goes. Somehow, the power of their delivery pushes the material that comes off as so pedestrian on CD, and so it's hard to think of someone who'd really react negatively to this set.
Unfortunately, I was in no condition to continue on for the last three acts of the night. I wanted strongly to see Cannibal Corpse, but I'm seeing them at Wacken this summer, so it wasn't worth turning myself into one of their album covers to stick around for their set. And then, of course, there was no motivation to survive Unearth and make it to the "special guest jam"; people had been rumoring about Sacred Reich and Slayer, but Slayer is an active band, so you can see them sometime else, and Sacred Reich is also on the Wacken bill, so even if this had been how it went, I wouldn't have felt bad missing it. CC with Barnes? Also not interesting, and it also didn't happen; the only way I would have legitimately felt bad about not staying for this alleged once-in-a-lifetime event is if they somehow got Cirith Ungol back together to play down Frost & Fire. Metal Blade being what it is now, I was pretty confident that this wasn't going to happen -- and it didn't, though maybe sometime in the future NEMHF will be big enough to do the "cash offer you can't refuse" to get bands back together like Wacken and other top Euro fests regularly put up (the famous rumors of a million-euro guarantee for a Carcass reunion are probably fiction, but probably not far off the mark).
All in all, this was a good festival, though not great, but if all festivals were great, the standard would just be raised. This year was hurt greatly by several bands cancelling late; Cellador scratched due to illness, I Killed The Prom Queen and Abigail Williams broke up, and Satyricon couldn't get visas due to past criminal behavior. While I don't much miss many of the above (only Satyricon, and better to try and see them somewhere where Fenriz and Nocturno Culto may come out to play a few "covers"), the cancellations played hell with the schedule and enhanced the atmosphere of pure chaos that often seems to surround the fest. After the super-A-list lineup of last year, this two-day version has to feel like a letdown, but it's really just coming back to earth; as always, there's the hope that next year the scheduling will be tighter, the overall lineup quality a little better, and a little more real metal and real hardcore instead of just all metalcore, all the time, and it's realistic to believe that this step can be made from this year, while last year's was really too good to be sustained. Contrary to what might be implied from a lot of the commentary on the Saturday headliners, I did have a good time at this fest, met a bunch of cool people, and stuffed my ears and jacket with a bunch of good music. NEMHF is at least on the short list of the best festivals in North America, and we in New England are fortunate that it's right where we live.
I Survived A Korean Enkai And All I Got Was This Lousy Hangover
Well, not really. I don't have much of a headache, but that's mostly due to copious amounts of Pocari Sweat (Japanese Gatorade) rather than the actual circumstances of the party, and I feel fortunate that the local office here isn't as nuts about after-hours drinking as the rest of the country appears to be.
Those who know Japanese know that an enkai isn't just any excuse for people who work together to get wasted; in this case, our install team got a machine built and accepted by the customer less than 7 days from the day the first crates showed up at their loading dock, which happens to be a world record -- at least for our firm, but given the nature and size of implanters, probably for the industry as well. So the team lead gets a spot bonus, and the whole office goes out for Korean sushi and a hell of a lot of soju. As any expat who has done time in East Asia will tell you, there are two functions to any enkai involving foreigners: first, the usual one of bullying any junior and/or female employees into getting ridiculously trashed, and second, to haze the Westerners with food that is usually uncooked and often still alive, and which usually comes from animals that people with roots west of the Ural-Caucasus line don't consider food sources. I had already passed the spicy-foods test of Korean cuisine the first time that I went out with the local manager, using my Italian racial bonus to stun him by consuming large amounts of raw garlic slices, so this was actually the easy part.
Of course, "easy" is a relative term, and for a lot of people it does not cover snacking on octopus tentacles that are still squirming on the plate, looking for all the world like maggots roiling a carcass, slugs, or any number of species of parasitic worms. Death metal racial bonus to the rescue! It's a lot easier to eat things that look like they're still alive with "Where The Slime Live" or "Beyond The Unholy Grave" playing in the back of your head. Also, once you actually start chewing it, the octopus stops squirming rapidly, and most of the sea-worm bits that are also on the menu (plenty of normal sashimi for normal eating, too, when the freakout part is done) basically taste like nothing. Like octopus, it's a lot like eating rubber bands, except it doesn't taste like rubber: you chew and chew and chew and there's no content.
PROTIP: Dunk your living octopus tentacles in the hot sauce provided and hold them up for your colleagues to see. The tentacle freaks out at the capsacin content and will turn into a mini-octopus boner. Laugh a lot, eat it, and drink more soju.
In Korea, as in most other places, it's bad form to get so trashed that you need assistance getting home, but given the Confucian social structure and the office culture enforced by a decade and more of military dictatorship in the '80s, it's even worse form to refuse a drink at an office gathering, especially from someone in the organization who is more senior than you. This means that survival at one of these shindigs is heavily dependent on having a liver of complete iron -- and outweighing the rest of the participants by around a hundred pounds certainly doesn't hurt either. I feel really sorry for the other juniors in the office, who don't have this advantage to fall back on and drank about as much as I did, but they're probably glad that they're not working in a normal Korean office, where drinking like this after work is the norm rather than the exception. There have been a series of articles in the IHT here recently on the theme of excessive drinking, and Korea basically leads the world in lost productivity due to alcohol consumption. I'd believe it, but the economy is so ridiculous around here that it's almost scary to contemplate what it would be like if Korea sobered up and started taking work seriously.
PROTIP: Soju is served in shots, but is about half the proof value that Westerners expect from shooting liquors (around 19 percent, which is closer to sake). This means that you can do twice as many shots as you would normally -- and, in a setting like this one, you will drink that much. At least. In an extremely compressed amount of time. I'm pretty sure that I had somewhere between 14 and 20 in the space of a little less than 4 hours, some with cola, which M.D., as the least senior guy at the table, was very happy about (blame him, not me, if you're in Korea and get half-soju, half-Coke when you ask for a SoCo, even if I did come up with the name), but most without, which is definitely not something to try at home unless you also mass north of 110 kilos and have a habit of casually drinking several beers with your dinner. And yes, this was on a Thursday night and we all have to go in to work, most of us on highly sensitive and expensive and dangerous industrial equipment, in the morning.
Octopus and suicidal drivers aside, Korea has been a fun, cool, place so far; beer comes in plastic bottles of the size and construction that you'd expect to see cola in in the US, the roads are a lot safer than Beijing and not much crazier than Boston (yes, that is what is called "damning with faint praise", but it's not so bad), raw garlic is on the menu rather than on the Geneva Convention's hitlist, the people are nice, the climate is livable, and unlike some other places I've been in the Far East, they've left a fair bit of the natural landscape up as well, in addition to the huge concrete apartment buildings. It's a nice country; I'd rather be home, but there are worse places to get extended four days in.
Those who know Japanese know that an enkai isn't just any excuse for people who work together to get wasted; in this case, our install team got a machine built and accepted by the customer less than 7 days from the day the first crates showed up at their loading dock, which happens to be a world record -- at least for our firm, but given the nature and size of implanters, probably for the industry as well. So the team lead gets a spot bonus, and the whole office goes out for Korean sushi and a hell of a lot of soju. As any expat who has done time in East Asia will tell you, there are two functions to any enkai involving foreigners: first, the usual one of bullying any junior and/or female employees into getting ridiculously trashed, and second, to haze the Westerners with food that is usually uncooked and often still alive, and which usually comes from animals that people with roots west of the Ural-Caucasus line don't consider food sources. I had already passed the spicy-foods test of Korean cuisine the first time that I went out with the local manager, using my Italian racial bonus to stun him by consuming large amounts of raw garlic slices, so this was actually the easy part.
Of course, "easy" is a relative term, and for a lot of people it does not cover snacking on octopus tentacles that are still squirming on the plate, looking for all the world like maggots roiling a carcass, slugs, or any number of species of parasitic worms. Death metal racial bonus to the rescue! It's a lot easier to eat things that look like they're still alive with "Where The Slime Live" or "Beyond The Unholy Grave" playing in the back of your head. Also, once you actually start chewing it, the octopus stops squirming rapidly, and most of the sea-worm bits that are also on the menu (plenty of normal sashimi for normal eating, too, when the freakout part is done) basically taste like nothing. Like octopus, it's a lot like eating rubber bands, except it doesn't taste like rubber: you chew and chew and chew and there's no content.
PROTIP: Dunk your living octopus tentacles in the hot sauce provided and hold them up for your colleagues to see. The tentacle freaks out at the capsacin content and will turn into a mini-octopus boner. Laugh a lot, eat it, and drink more soju.
In Korea, as in most other places, it's bad form to get so trashed that you need assistance getting home, but given the Confucian social structure and the office culture enforced by a decade and more of military dictatorship in the '80s, it's even worse form to refuse a drink at an office gathering, especially from someone in the organization who is more senior than you. This means that survival at one of these shindigs is heavily dependent on having a liver of complete iron -- and outweighing the rest of the participants by around a hundred pounds certainly doesn't hurt either. I feel really sorry for the other juniors in the office, who don't have this advantage to fall back on and drank about as much as I did, but they're probably glad that they're not working in a normal Korean office, where drinking like this after work is the norm rather than the exception. There have been a series of articles in the IHT here recently on the theme of excessive drinking, and Korea basically leads the world in lost productivity due to alcohol consumption. I'd believe it, but the economy is so ridiculous around here that it's almost scary to contemplate what it would be like if Korea sobered up and started taking work seriously.
PROTIP: Soju is served in shots, but is about half the proof value that Westerners expect from shooting liquors (around 19 percent, which is closer to sake). This means that you can do twice as many shots as you would normally -- and, in a setting like this one, you will drink that much. At least. In an extremely compressed amount of time. I'm pretty sure that I had somewhere between 14 and 20 in the space of a little less than 4 hours, some with cola, which M.D., as the least senior guy at the table, was very happy about (blame him, not me, if you're in Korea and get half-soju, half-Coke when you ask for a SoCo, even if I did come up with the name), but most without, which is definitely not something to try at home unless you also mass north of 110 kilos and have a habit of casually drinking several beers with your dinner. And yes, this was on a Thursday night and we all have to go in to work, most of us on highly sensitive and expensive and dangerous industrial equipment, in the morning.
Octopus and suicidal drivers aside, Korea has been a fun, cool, place so far; beer comes in plastic bottles of the size and construction that you'd expect to see cola in in the US, the roads are a lot safer than Beijing and not much crazier than Boston (yes, that is what is called "damning with faint praise", but it's not so bad), raw garlic is on the menu rather than on the Geneva Convention's hitlist, the people are nice, the climate is livable, and unlike some other places I've been in the Far East, they've left a fair bit of the natural landscape up as well, in addition to the huge concrete apartment buildings. It's a nice country; I'd rather be home, but there are worse places to get extended four days in.
a month and a half of catch-up
Damn, I didn't realize I was so behind. Korea, Metalfest, and cleaning up at work from several weeks spent overseas have left this record a little out of date, so here goes what's been going lately.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Korea, day 1
I'm in Korea, concerned about the engineering students at VA Tech, even though I'm pretty sure that I don't know anyone personally who's there right now, and mostly over jet lag though I'm still tired and still trying to get my legs under me. Hooray foreign service.
I'm still trying to organize my impressions of this place, but there are no pictures as yet because I bought a bunch of lemon batteries before I left, and they are all now dead. If you buy batteries at a going-out-of-business sale, prepare to have them die on you within minutes if they have any charge in them at all. This doubly sucks because this country is ridiculously expensive, and it's only with extreme difficulty that I'll be able to withdraw enough cash, per day, to cover taxi rides to and from work, let alone buying batteries and some eats.
Of course, Korea has turned into a cashless society, though mostly by accident and it doesn't really help people like me. To give an idea, this is a country where the basic currency unit is inflated to about 100 times the Chinese yuan, but which has a cost of living most similar to Japan. This means that you can't really get anything done for less than 1000 won, but the largest denomination commonly available is 10,000 won. This is a lot like trying to pay for your life in the US using only 10-dollar bills and leads to wallets that more closely resemble pimp rolls. In China, stuff for Westerners looks really expensive, but the yuan is about where it needs to be, given the overall economic circumstances; the won is in desperate need of a restructuring. France got out of its problems with the "new franc" in the '60s, and Italy ducked out of the lira becoming a national embarrassment by joining the euro, but the South Korean economy is good enough that the won is probably not going to be revised any time soon. Maybe after reunification, but there's probably a greater chance of Kim Jong Il giving up on his own than any unprovoked currency change. Everything here, like in a lot of modern Asia, is by card and i-banking anyway.
On the upside, I'm still alive after two trips on the roads, which is noteworthy, because as of 2003, when my current edition of Dangerous Places came out, South Korea was third behind Afghanistan (I think) and Kenya for road fatality rates, and definitely the most dangerous in the First World. The roads are a little anarchic and people drive too fast, but it's not as bad as Beijing was, and Massachusetts drivers who have their head on a swivel ought not to have too many problems. The biggest issue is that the idea of "lane" is not universally accepted here, and some drivers, including both cabbies I've ridden with so far, will put the dotted line under the center of the vehicle at times rather than leaving it to one side or the other. If everyone does this, though, you can fit two or three more vehicles abreast (depending on the size of the highway) onto the road, which given the rush-hour congestion is probably the point. Of course, to make that work, people have to drive real straight and not have stuff hanging off the sides of their vehicles, which is not always the case. On the way over to the office this morning, we passed at least three accidents and saw a wrecker in the opposite lane hauling away one more. Again, it's not Beijing, probably because the average car is better built and a lot better maintained, but it's not Peoria either.
Despite taking 27 hours, the trip in wasn't all that bad; I should have talked to the attractive dental professional who sat next to me on the flight from Boston to Chicago more about my own field service instead of just reading DP all the way over, because she was certainly interested once we actually did start talking, waiting for the rest of the plane to disembark so we could get off and continue to our next connections, but the long flight around the Pacific Rim didn't include any leg injuries or middle-schoolers falling asleep and nearly going face-first into my lap, unlike last time. Also, Japan, like Germany, is a cool place to make connections from, as Kirin is free on United and the 'snack' provided on the 2-hour flight to Seoul is not just a bag of pretzels, as it would be in the US, but also included two pieces of sushi and a carefully crust-trimmed (lol Japan) ham and egg and cheese sandwich. Maybe the sushi was 'airline sushi', but being Japanese airline sushi still puts it a cut above the 'supermarket sushi' that I eat too much of at home.
So: South Korea is dangerous to drive around in, expensive, smoggy, and located right next door to the last remaining Stalinist dictatorship in the world. Despite all these things, it's pretty decent; not quite Germany, but definitely among the better of the countries I've visited. It's a little warm here, but normal people like that instead of fleeing north, and though there's a lot of construction associated with the furious economy and there are numbered company-housing high-rises absolutely everywhere once you get out of Seoul center, there's still a lot of the natural landscape left; on one side of the freeway you have a forest of concrete projects, and on the other side you have a forest of, um, well, forest. This is a nice country, though just like the last time I went to Asia, I don't know the local language for crap, but with slightly greater English penetration this is less of an issue. I'm not going to be homesick for Seoul when I leave like I was for Dresden, and it's not as visually interesting here as Hong Kong was, but this is a nice country and I'm not going to mind overly much if I get sent back... though I'll put more time into learning Korean (somewhere in between work, sleeping, shows, and doing Chinese again) before I do.
I get out of work early today, and hopefully will get a chance to get some batteries and take some pictures -- provided, of course, that I survive the road back. The really interesting part at the customer site starts tomorrow.
I'm still trying to organize my impressions of this place, but there are no pictures as yet because I bought a bunch of lemon batteries before I left, and they are all now dead. If you buy batteries at a going-out-of-business sale, prepare to have them die on you within minutes if they have any charge in them at all. This doubly sucks because this country is ridiculously expensive, and it's only with extreme difficulty that I'll be able to withdraw enough cash, per day, to cover taxi rides to and from work, let alone buying batteries and some eats.
Of course, Korea has turned into a cashless society, though mostly by accident and it doesn't really help people like me. To give an idea, this is a country where the basic currency unit is inflated to about 100 times the Chinese yuan, but which has a cost of living most similar to Japan. This means that you can't really get anything done for less than 1000 won, but the largest denomination commonly available is 10,000 won. This is a lot like trying to pay for your life in the US using only 10-dollar bills and leads to wallets that more closely resemble pimp rolls. In China, stuff for Westerners looks really expensive, but the yuan is about where it needs to be, given the overall economic circumstances; the won is in desperate need of a restructuring. France got out of its problems with the "new franc" in the '60s, and Italy ducked out of the lira becoming a national embarrassment by joining the euro, but the South Korean economy is good enough that the won is probably not going to be revised any time soon. Maybe after reunification, but there's probably a greater chance of Kim Jong Il giving up on his own than any unprovoked currency change. Everything here, like in a lot of modern Asia, is by card and i-banking anyway.
On the upside, I'm still alive after two trips on the roads, which is noteworthy, because as of 2003, when my current edition of Dangerous Places came out, South Korea was third behind Afghanistan (I think) and Kenya for road fatality rates, and definitely the most dangerous in the First World. The roads are a little anarchic and people drive too fast, but it's not as bad as Beijing was, and Massachusetts drivers who have their head on a swivel ought not to have too many problems. The biggest issue is that the idea of "lane" is not universally accepted here, and some drivers, including both cabbies I've ridden with so far, will put the dotted line under the center of the vehicle at times rather than leaving it to one side or the other. If everyone does this, though, you can fit two or three more vehicles abreast (depending on the size of the highway) onto the road, which given the rush-hour congestion is probably the point. Of course, to make that work, people have to drive real straight and not have stuff hanging off the sides of their vehicles, which is not always the case. On the way over to the office this morning, we passed at least three accidents and saw a wrecker in the opposite lane hauling away one more. Again, it's not Beijing, probably because the average car is better built and a lot better maintained, but it's not Peoria either.
Despite taking 27 hours, the trip in wasn't all that bad; I should have talked to the attractive dental professional who sat next to me on the flight from Boston to Chicago more about my own field service instead of just reading DP all the way over, because she was certainly interested once we actually did start talking, waiting for the rest of the plane to disembark so we could get off and continue to our next connections, but the long flight around the Pacific Rim didn't include any leg injuries or middle-schoolers falling asleep and nearly going face-first into my lap, unlike last time. Also, Japan, like Germany, is a cool place to make connections from, as Kirin is free on United and the 'snack' provided on the 2-hour flight to Seoul is not just a bag of pretzels, as it would be in the US, but also included two pieces of sushi and a carefully crust-trimmed (lol Japan) ham and egg and cheese sandwich. Maybe the sushi was 'airline sushi', but being Japanese airline sushi still puts it a cut above the 'supermarket sushi' that I eat too much of at home.
So: South Korea is dangerous to drive around in, expensive, smoggy, and located right next door to the last remaining Stalinist dictatorship in the world. Despite all these things, it's pretty decent; not quite Germany, but definitely among the better of the countries I've visited. It's a little warm here, but normal people like that instead of fleeing north, and though there's a lot of construction associated with the furious economy and there are numbered company-housing high-rises absolutely everywhere once you get out of Seoul center, there's still a lot of the natural landscape left; on one side of the freeway you have a forest of concrete projects, and on the other side you have a forest of, um, well, forest. This is a nice country, though just like the last time I went to Asia, I don't know the local language for crap, but with slightly greater English penetration this is less of an issue. I'm not going to be homesick for Seoul when I leave like I was for Dresden, and it's not as visually interesting here as Hong Kong was, but this is a nice country and I'm not going to mind overly much if I get sent back... though I'll put more time into learning Korean (somewhere in between work, sleeping, shows, and doing Chinese again) before I do.
I get out of work early today, and hopefully will get a chance to get some batteries and take some pictures -- provided, of course, that I survive the road back. The really interesting part at the customer site starts tomorrow.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
the rudest ham salad sandwich in the world
Like many financially stable people of my generation, my brother and I cook experimentally. However, while other people have marvelous revelatory experiences cooking in cooperation with their roommates or partners, we don't, mostly because we work way the hell too much and there's a lot of time when we can't be experimental due to having to eat hot pockets or ramen or cold cereal for dinner in the short interval between coming home and going to bed. When I'm doing bushels of Chinese steamed buns, he's eating uncooked oatmeal in milk, and when, like tonight, he's marinating chicken breasts in all kinds of weird sauce mixes, I'm chopping up ham that has been badly burned in a microwave to make some sandwiches on expired bread.
Of course, sometimes non-sucky food happens by accident. To explain this one, we need to turn it over to C. "Roast Beef" Kazenzakis, to run down......
the rudest ham salad sandwich in the world
man you may say what the hell business has a ham salad sandwich got bein' rude but this one sure is. it is made out of primo ingredients so you know it is necessarily rude, but it is rudely prepared to be doubly rude.
start cutting some slices off the end of a cured virginia ham that somebody left in the fridge like paul's brother which he got before he realized that he was still allergic to the preservatives and thus could not eat it, or like ray would do all buying something and then forgetting about it in the gameroom fridge or something. you need one slice for each sandwich that you plan to make but you also need to make sure that the ham is not cooked because then the rest of the cooking even such as it is would be hell of unnecessary as you could just make a normal ham salad sandwich and not burn your fingers later.
if the ham is indeed not cooked cut the slices into hell of classy julienne strips and put them on a plate and put that plate in the microwave. cook them on high for three or four minutes or some such time that when you take them out the ham is sizzling and in places burned like when you make bacon for real old school in a fry pan. now the strips can get chopped down to the small bits like in a normal ham salad sandwich. put them in a bowl with the minimum amount of mayo to suspend all the ham bits because this is the rudest ham salad sandwich in the world not the fattiest which is not rude when we are talking ham sandwiches.
the sandwich basically makes itself from here on out because seriously who doesn't know how to make a ham salad sandwich. but for extra rudeness you got to put it on art bread that is almost expired and use some gourmet lettuce and stuff. then you can eat it in front of your friends and when they are all like what the hell is that dogg you can be all it is the rudest ham salad sandwich in the world. they will not believe you but if you have more ham and mayo and bread you can make them one and they will then have to agree. it is the atomic cooking and the curing preservatives interacting which make the ham taste hell of rude so you must have good ham but otherwise the other good ingredients are kind of bonus.
I officially approve this sandwich and this pretend Achewood posting.
Of course, sometimes non-sucky food happens by accident. To explain this one, we need to turn it over to C. "Roast Beef" Kazenzakis, to run down......
the rudest ham salad sandwich in the world
man you may say what the hell business has a ham salad sandwich got bein' rude but this one sure is. it is made out of primo ingredients so you know it is necessarily rude, but it is rudely prepared to be doubly rude.
start cutting some slices off the end of a cured virginia ham that somebody left in the fridge like paul's brother which he got before he realized that he was still allergic to the preservatives and thus could not eat it, or like ray would do all buying something and then forgetting about it in the gameroom fridge or something. you need one slice for each sandwich that you plan to make but you also need to make sure that the ham is not cooked because then the rest of the cooking even such as it is would be hell of unnecessary as you could just make a normal ham salad sandwich and not burn your fingers later.
if the ham is indeed not cooked cut the slices into hell of classy julienne strips and put them on a plate and put that plate in the microwave. cook them on high for three or four minutes or some such time that when you take them out the ham is sizzling and in places burned like when you make bacon for real old school in a fry pan. now the strips can get chopped down to the small bits like in a normal ham salad sandwich. put them in a bowl with the minimum amount of mayo to suspend all the ham bits because this is the rudest ham salad sandwich in the world not the fattiest which is not rude when we are talking ham sandwiches.
the sandwich basically makes itself from here on out because seriously who doesn't know how to make a ham salad sandwich. but for extra rudeness you got to put it on art bread that is almost expired and use some gourmet lettuce and stuff. then you can eat it in front of your friends and when they are all like what the hell is that dogg you can be all it is the rudest ham salad sandwich in the world. they will not believe you but if you have more ham and mayo and bread you can make them one and they will then have to agree. it is the atomic cooking and the curing preservatives interacting which make the ham taste hell of rude so you must have good ham but otherwise the other good ingredients are kind of bonus.
I officially approve this sandwich and this pretend Achewood posting.
three shows due to laziness
There are three show reviews in this one, because I am lazy and spent the past week-and-a-half doing other stuff like sleeping, going to shows, and cleaning my house. Let's fuckin go:
This one is from the weekend after I came back from Texas; a good show at a good venue in Haverhill.
Shroud of Bereavement with Hekseri, Burn My Remains, and Wings Never Shattered
River City Billiards, Haverhill, 3/24/2007
--
So after the exhaustion of the previous night's mostly mainstream show, it was down into the underground and off into the snow and gathering darkness for this one. Given the bands involved, at least the last two, it fit perfectly, though it was a little rough to drive through on the way back.
I got up in time and got in just around when the bands were supposed to be starting, but due to the circumstances around the final lineup -- Id was supposed to be playing this, but their guitarist got clipped by a car the day before and Wings Never Shattered got added hours before they were supposed to go on -- the setup ran on for most of the next hour. This gave me some time to hang out and start drinking, and also to browse through the Oak Knoll table, which is a convenient euphemism for "lose all my money". The gig turned into a free show due to issues with door control -- the venue wanted to keep their normal bar custom as well, I guess, and had another room on the second floor that they needed to have open -- but I still feel bad about not compensating the bands, as this was a good show at a venue that has a fair degree of potential.
Wings Never Shattered [4/7]
Fittingly enough, the replacement band came in at replacement level, which shows why the term exists; if WNS was better, they'd have been on the bill initially, instead of coming off the figurative bench when Id had to scratch. They were okay, but as metalcore goes, fairly generic; there were some good parts, but more that everyone has heard already five thousand times before. The potential is definitely there for this band to diversify or otherwise distinguish themselves, but this step just hasn't been taken yet. Also, the vagaries of their genre mean that whether or not they decide to take that next step up, they could be on the main stage at Metalfest next year, or they could spend their entire career playing gigs no bigger than this one. When the rules for success are so ridiculously nondeterministic, it's very difficult to see the effort to become more than 'good enough' as worth the candle. They were entertaining and they drew well, but the sets did strictly improve as the night went on.
Burn My Remains [5/7]
I'd heard a fair bit about these guys due to interest in other North Shore/Merrimac Valley bands, and they certainly didn't disappoint, pounding out a strong set of brutal death metal, filled in with just enough neoclassical melodics to really set themselves apart. I'm hoping to see them again in the future, though it doesn't seem that they travel much outside their home range -- though this is less of an issue if there are more good shows up here in the Blight. The only real issue here was that I couldn't entirely hear the bass; the bass lines tracked mostly with the rhythm guitar, but for a 8x10 cab, there ought to have been a little more sound coming out of it. The sound guy was also a last-second fill-in, but in the main did a good job, fillips like these aside.
Hekseri [6/7]
Though there were some issues with Megan's mic initially -- like it wasn't on or someone moving equipment across the floor had kicked the other end out of the soundboard -- this was a thoroughly strong and dominating set of thrashing black metal that even drew in the bouncers who were supposed to be watching the door to the upstairs to marvel not only at girls driving a sonic tornado, but also at Seth's relentless blastbeat pace. The floor was thinner for them, at least initially, as the only non-local band, but it filled in properly in short order, though some weaklings might have been intimidated off by Larissa getting on the floor and attacking people with her bass (a good time for the rest, though). While their set was a little clipped at the end -- the bar wanted the bands over at midnightish, maybe due to noise ordinances, so the delay in startup made a definite difference -- it was still pretty fully developed, and definitely kickass.
Shroud of Bereavement [6/7]
This is where the time limitations really hurt; Shroud came right out at an amazing level, and had this set run as long as it was probably intended to, would have gotten into the top echelon. Though the stage was crowded with the six bandmembers, including three guitarists, it definitely made a difference, as this sort of doom metal really requires that kind of wall of sound to crush over the audience and get their full attention. The strongest comparison is probably to Novembers Doom, as a similar inheritance from multiple sources strongly reworked, but there were also parts where I couldn't help but notice the resemblance to Nightingale. Since he lives in Sweden and doesn't tour so much any more, local bands that can evoke a similar depth and maturity are definitely worth your attention. Though they did get cut off a little, this was still a great performance, and I'm going to make a point to see them in the future.
Unfortunately, I didn't stick around either to pick up Shroud's CDs or to go to Dan's after-party, both of which I should have; like a goober, I parked at the T station again, and like a goober, I was worried about getting towed or shit. I've got to either start parking smarter or caring less, as I still had to scoop slush off my car and drive home over windy back roads, but I did it short two discs from an awesome band and without further metal socialization. Not fun.
Now, shows from this past weekend:
1349 with Goatwhore, Nachtmystium, and Averse Sefira...and Mortis Deveia, Aura of Aquila, Zircon, and Cold Northern Vengeance
Mark's, Bedford, 3/31/2007
--
I had to bag a party for one of my high school friends in order to get up for this, but friends who've stayed around where they've been their whole life will tend to stay there; 1349 comes and goes, and the chance to see them on a small stage rather than out in front of 20,000+ ragers through crappy PA towers (like I will this summer) is something that does not occur a whole lot. However, as things panned out, I probably could have dropped in and said hi before going up, but of course there was no way to know that at the time.
Doors were reported for 6, and I got up there around 6:15, fully expecting to go in and find that I'd missed a couple local openers, because this is Mark's, and their ridiculous pay-to-play policy and its attendant circumstances have led to the running gag in the scene that doors for any Mark's show are at about 10 AM on the day before, and that by the time anyone actually gets there, they have already missed half of the 1500 local openers. Your band has just been added to this show, and you need to sell 15 tickets, even though this event is now in the past. However, wonder of wonders, the local support had been frozen at four bands, all of whom were quite good, and doors was actually delayed for soundchecking for the touring acts. So I stood around outside for a bit and talked some with Henry (Mortis Dev) and then briefly with Paul (CNV), who was then working on rounding up his band and understandably a little chafed about having to go on first. Given the circumstances under which CNV got on this show, it's perhaps not surprising that the club would do this, but looking at this bill and how the lineup fell together -- and also, to a lesser degree, what kinds of performances were delivered -- it makes a lot more sense commerically than it does artistically or socially. Somebody always has to go on first, because otherwise the show just fails to start, but on this occasion it should not have been CNV.
Eventually, they let us in, and after getting a beer I went down to the second-stage end to make sure that I didn't miss any CNV. I didn't, even including their initial start, which got cut off because they were still soundchecking up on the main stage. Though they were able to get their sound dialed in, they were notified after this that they'd start playing in 20 minutes. This is far too long to leave metalheads in the vicinity of three full merch and distro tables; I need to train my wallet better so that it doesn't immediately jump up and start vomiting money all over the dealers' hands in this situation. I'm more than satisfied with picking up everything Moonsorrow's ever done that I didn't have yet, plus some other rarities, but it was tough slapping it down enough to still be able to support the local and touring bands. Sure, it's all the same metal scene, but direct support is a lot better than having it routed through some sub-licensor label in Russia.
Eventually, CNV started around 8ish. If I'd dropped in on Jay's, I probably could have seen most of their set, but I had no way of knowing a Mark's show would start this late, and I'd feel pissed about missing any part of CNV in any case.
Cold Northern Vengeance [6/7]
CNV's Arising Dungeon Cult is one of the best black metal records from the North American continent, in its clarity and atmospheres as much as in its rawness and starkness. Live, with imperfect control over their sound (the second stage at Mark's is really good, but it's still a second stage at a bar), the stress is more on the raw aspects, presenting a different sound, but one no less cool or less black metal. Though it still hadn't really gotten dark when they started, if you closed your eyes at any point in the set, it wasn't hard to immediately infer the kind of frigid and snowing night as when they should have played supporting Enslaved. It was a great experience, probably the truest set of the night, and, of course, full of kickass music; they closed with "A Past Forgotten", and there was not a song the rest of the night more frigid or more epic.
As good as this set was, though, their support for Watain and Angelcorpse in Boston next month should be even more interesting, as there are a lot more antifas in Boston than in New Hampshire, so some might show up, even though you very seldom get antifas at a black metal show. I believe Paul in his assertions that CNV isn't a political band, and because I also believe in Amon Amarth's live-and-let-live-as-long-as-they-also-live-and-let-live approach to the right, I'm not going to stir shit with their more politicized fans, but some of the more political on the other end might. Burzum, Nokturnal Mortum, and even Graveland kit I can understand, but when you show up to a black metal show wearing Skrewdriver gear or shirts explicitly advertising racially-oriented forums, it's pretty obvious that it's being done for polemical or recruitment purposes. People have a right to believe whatever they want, as long as they aren't forcing it on others, but I'm not sure that the streets of Cambridge will take that view.
Political bullcrap aside, CNV is still awesome, and I'm still, obviously, looking forward to seeing them again, even though Boston in May is necessarily going to be much less grvm than New Hampshire, anytime.
Averse Sefira [5/7]
The venue was still filling up, so I was able to basically turn around from CNV and walk straight up to the stagefront. This was good and bad; I was, indeed, right the hell up front, but as a result I'm not sure that I got the optimum sound out of the experience. This was still a really good set, but they had the misfortune to be bracketed between two stellar locals, and while they aren't as thoroughly derivative of early Emperor now as on the earlier recorded stuff that I've heard from them, they haven't completely differentiated themselves either. If Zircon hadn't been on the bill, this would have been the most death-driven set (well, of the actual black metal bands, anyways), but unfortunately, they had to cut in between a band that evokes the spirit of old Norway better than they do, and one of the most complete crushing machines that the Northeast has to offer. After another record, they'll probably have their feet under them better, but on this night, Averse Sefira was just really good in a setting where there was a lot of greatness available.
Zircon [6/7]
I was playing around with the idea of doing split scores, and had I actually gone through with it, Averse Sefira would have come out with a 5.5 and these guys with a 6.5. As the last time, they absolutely slaughtered; just an excellent performance, little short of the transcendant. If you live in New England and like the sound of a Naglfar-Dissection-Zyklon fusion, you need to get to the show or shows that Zircon is doing within easy driving distance of you over the next two weeks (don't ask me where, just check your local bills, everyone knows Zircon is on every show); everyone else, either hit up the Oak Knoll mailorder or wait for Jeremy to upsell them to Candlelight or Relapse or something.
Nachtmystium [6/7]
I hadn't heard anything from these guys, but was looking forward to seeing them anyways; new and different music is always a good thing. of course, it's debatable how much was new and different in the set of black'n'roll that they cranked through, inheriting more from Celtic Frost than from what Goatwhore would do a little later on, but it was quite well-executed and the crowd actually in front of the stage -- I was off to the side again, ahead but out of the way of the people who wanted to be front and center -- was thoroughly into it. If the black'n'roll sound puts down permanent roots in the US, so much the better, especially as a contrast to the current dominating school in USBM, but I really need to get out my Vried disc again and be sure what and how much the differences are. Of course, Vried wasn't on this bill, and this was a really good set regardless; I'll have to see them again at Metalfest to be sure that there wasn't any acoustic-shadow bits getting in the way of my understanding of their sound.
Aura of Aquila [5/7]
These guys are actually from my area (Danvers, close enough, even in ultra-parochial New England), and Jim was allegedly in [Endless] Ruin with Ryan and Danny et al (I don't really remember him, but I only saw them once and it was like 4 years ago). Though they had an interesting sound, it wasn't always completely together in performance, and anyone who knows anything about the New England black metal scene would have to conclude that they were slotted where they were for commercial reasons, pushed this late so that people who bought tickets from them would stay at the club, buying drinks, at least through more than half the gig rather than seeing them and leaving early in order to avoid driving an hour and more home at Police Harrassment O'Clock in the morning. They were decent, and I have to pick up a CD from them at some point -- forgot this time -- but even considering their innate qualities, and that this was the bass player's last show, they should have still gone on earlier rather than later, if only in favor of the more high-profile bands on the local half of the bill.
Goatwhore [7/7]
Your eyes are not deceiving you, though I sure thought my ears were while watching the set. Despite the fact that Goatwhore at this point is, as commented (by the bassist from CNV), total Celtic Frost worship, there's nothing wrong with such when it's delivered with such absolute power and such amazing clarity of sound, especially since Celtic Frost isn't exactly doing this early-period sound themselves any more. About equal parts black'n'roll and old Frost, even down to Tom Warrior-style "ugh!" exclamations, this was by a long ways the best performance that I've seen from Goatwhore, and while they aren't particularly revolutionary in anything they do, they're definitely always entertaining, which is the goal to be aspired to for such perpetual road warriors; sometimes you just get a decent set, and sometimes you get an amazing one like this one, but you know they're always going to at least put on a good performance.
Mortis Deveia [5/7]
The Henry Khiev Show [7/7]
While the comments outside the show before doors from some of the other fans that Mortis Dev "didn't fit" on this bill were good for lulz -- because Henry and I were standing less than ten feet away from the people making them, apparently invisible or something -- they were also true to a certain degree; Mortis Deveia is not a black metal band, and they were principally on the bill for two reasons: first, they kick ass, and second, they draw a lot of people from the Valley who might not otherwise show up for a black metal show. Accordingly, they went on a lot later than I was expecting them to, to keep those extra bodies in the venue and drinking and tipping as long as possible. Their set was decent, and fairly high-energy, but there was very much the feeling of a fairly standard-form NWOSDM-driven thrash band riffing out, with occasional intermissions where Henry would do something incredible with his axe. It's not at the Joe Stump level, but it's also not nearly as balanced as some of the other local bands with sick lead guitarists that I follow. As a career pessimist, I can't see this as having good implications for future band chemistry, but there were some external factors that may have led to this being a down night for the other four members; I know I've seen better overall sets from them in the past, and hope to continue to see good sets from them in the future.
1349 [6/7]
The sound at the beginning of their set was oddly really quiet, much as with Dark Funeral the last time I was up here, and additionally I was standing over at the side of the stage, in a bit of an acoustic shadow, which pushed the sound that much lower and less clear for me. Despite this, the band soldiered on and eventually got properly dialed in all across the hall after a couple songs, unleashing their take on the oldest and coldest of Norway over all those in attendance. It may be me misremembering Dark Medieval Times, but the feel as far as I could compare was closest to a more closed-in and aggressive early Satyricon -- though Frost was not on the drums, at least at this gig, for reasons of undisclosed origin that might be personal as well as legal. (Frost allegedly beat the crap out of some guy over a girl or something back in the early '90s, and as a result has a felony assault charge on his rap sheet; perhaps not as significant as Jon Nodtveit or Bard Eithun's Murder Two convictions, but still problematic for the INS or whatever they're calling it these days.) It was still a kickass performance and a fitting capstone to the night, even if it wasn't quite as well-presented as Goatwhore's unexpectedly killer outing; black metal, even the kind that crosses the seas to play gigs, thrives on making people fight through the circumstances to the quality music beneath, and there was certainly plenty of good stuff here.
Eventually, of course, they had to close up, and since Mark's has learned their lesson about putting local bands on after the headliners (at least when the tour is as relatively inexpensive as this one), it was time to head home through the cop-ridden roads and highways down to the border and freedom from dunnage. While Louis from Goatwhore is certainly right that as soon as you stop supporting shows, you'll start bitching about how nothing good ever comes around any more, it's better for all concerned to support shows at places besides Mark's. The security is inconsistent, not patting people down but throwing people out without warnings for moshing, the local support has to pay for the privilege of playing (on an admittedly well-tuned PA setup) at the back of the hall to mostly the same people who would be there at a bar or basement show that they would be getting paid for or at least not losing money on, and on leaving, people have to deal with New Hampshire's finest, who are an obstacle not only to those who are legitimately too impaired to operate, but also to anyone else they happen to decide is a likely mark. This may strike some people as harsh on NH cops, but these people don't have anyone in their family who got a $300 ticket for reckless operation for pulling over when directed by a police officer on an empty highway. New Hampshire extracts enough revenue from Massachusetts by selling liquor on Sundays and without state taxes; it's not strictly necessary to supplement this by pulling over anyone with Mass plates that they think they can hang a violation on, but it still happens.
This last one is from Sunday at ye goode olde Somerville watering hole & Chinese dining room. Note: the Skybar does not actually serve Chinese food, but they don't mind people taking in takeout from the Chinese place next door.
Deathamphetamine with Dominatus and Volatile
Skybar, Somerville, 4/1/2007
--
In sharp contrast to the previous night's black metal festivities, this was a firmly grounded thrashout, but no less cool or possessed of less good music. There are a lot of high scores on the books for this weekend and nothing average or lower; maybe my standards are dropping, but the more likely conclusion is that the bands this weekend were just really that awesome.
Chastened by previous weeks, I made it down earlier and got there right at doors, in time to check in and go next door to pick up some Chinese, then come back and eat it before Volatile started up. It was a little close, but helped by the fact that the band delayed a little, potentially waiting for more people to show up, which I don't understand. The people, not the bands' reaction to them not showing; it's a Sunday evening, there's no football, so you come down, get some good Chinese food, drink some beers, and are done and can stand up sometime during the first band's set. It's not hard, y'all, and for the most part -- this one definitely included -- the Sunday shows at the Skybar have been really cool.
Volatile [6/7]
lol Volatile moar liek Vo-latile amirite lol
Now that the Encyclopedia Dramatica-style description is out of the way, it's time to be moderately serious, as the band is; they're not doing a 3 Inches of Blood-style piss take with their interpretations of primal thrash, but they definitely still are having fun with it, as it's fun music. If you go through your collection in alphabetical order you can find a lot of similarities: Venom, Vio-lence (viz the joke above), Volatile. While the focal point is still on their covers and the frantic passion that they execute them with, their originals are steadily improving, and there's a few that can stand in with their takes on Slayer and Kreator's early periods without losing out in quality or intensity. They're still developing as an original band, but they're already fully formed in their handling of other people's material, and the good reaction to their insanity in executing it seemed to feed forward into their confidence and project the later originals in the set stronger. Volatile may not ever stop playing a long slice of covers, but there may well come a day when people will wish they didn't, in order to give more time to their original work.
Volatile played as a four-piece, though I could almost swear that they had another guitarist when I saw them at Great Scott. The sound wasn't materially degraded for it, but if they're currently normally a five-piece, they're just the latest in a long string of bands playing the Skybar a member down.
Dominatus [5/7]
Like Deathamphetamine, Dominatus is currently in lineup flux, but unlike Deathamphetamine, they weren't able to persuade the exiting member to show up for this gig. The bassist search continues, and the consequence for this set was an occasionally confused sound; the composition was strong enough that the absence of the low end tying things together did make a difference. The impression was of a decent death metal band in the brutal style most common to this area -- Bane of Existence is probably the closest -- trying to play with one hand tied behind its back, though the sound did get better and more together as the set wore on. They also made an interesting exception to the regular practice, covering "Hermod's Ride to Hel" off Amon Amarth's most recent record, which they did a good rendition of. Metal bands, as with practically everyone else, cover mostly old standards, with contemporary material rarely getting played; it's not really possible, in the age of the internet, to do like Metallica did and clone some far-off band to wow local audiences, but nobody's really doing that, either. This will hopefully lead to more contemporary covers in the few non-original slots available; there's a lot of good deep cuts out there that the bands who wrote them don't do live, and someone might as well play the ones that strike their fancy.
This one incidental bit definitely inspired me; if I revive Coelem with actual people as opposed to a studio project, any shortfalls in the set will be filled with uncredited (except in this notice) endZone and Solar Signs material, both because it's really cool and to see if I can get away with co-opting stuff from ten years ago in Russia that never even made much of a stir there. It's not going to happen, but that doesn't make it not a cool idea.
Deathamphetamine [7/7]
Slightly less epic and slightly more crossover-driven than when I saw them last, Deathamphetamine left nothing on the table for Ben's final gig on vocals before moving out of state. Though there was a lot of commentary from the band members about how much stuff they were fucking up, it wasn't immediately noticeable, as the band for the most part stayed together and in time, and throughout laid down a battering barrage of variously-influenced thrash-death. They also got one of the longest sets I've seen from a local show; chalk that one up to three bands on a nearly-three hour timetable and quick setchanges. The result was a mad frenzy of headbanging and flailing limbs, driven up in intensity by action as well as invective from Rich (IWEIPH), who is also not long for this coast. It was a great set, one of the few at this place where the band has gone down off the stage to thrash along with the crowd, and the second-craziest in terms of forward motion to the last time I saw Goreality here, because this time I was the one getting knocked into the table, and I was able to catch it before it fell all the way over. Good times, and hopefully the band will pick up a suitable vocalist in short order so that they can continue rolling on. It'll be tough to replace Ben, but that's also what they said about Taneli Jarva, and Sentenced did okay once Ville got on the same page with the rest of the band.
Though things got over kind of early, despite the long sets, I still left shortly after nabbing Deathamphetamine's CD, overdue by about 5 months through nobody's real fault, except maybe the band's, indirectly, for not realizing how fast their awesomeness would run through their initial pressing. Can't go wrong with 18 tracks of Deathamphetamine for 3 bucks, but I also did have to go to work in the morning and finally take my car in for repairs; after it gets the new bumper, I can start subtly stickering it, which I hadn't done before due to the fact that it was popped and needed replacing.
In other show news, Revocation has been added to the NEMHF. This is the best news about the festival since I found out that there were a lot more bands that I didn't care about playing than bands that I really don't like. They're playing Friday, and they're probably going to be mired on the second stage, but they're still going to be blowing large cavities into the poser hordes and hopefully catching the ear of some of the industry types who are always about. The only downside to this is that now I need to add two offensive-lineman-style knee braces to my festival expenses. \m/.
This one is from the weekend after I came back from Texas; a good show at a good venue in Haverhill.
Shroud of Bereavement with Hekseri, Burn My Remains, and Wings Never Shattered
River City Billiards, Haverhill, 3/24/2007
--
So after the exhaustion of the previous night's mostly mainstream show, it was down into the underground and off into the snow and gathering darkness for this one. Given the bands involved, at least the last two, it fit perfectly, though it was a little rough to drive through on the way back.
I got up in time and got in just around when the bands were supposed to be starting, but due to the circumstances around the final lineup -- Id was supposed to be playing this, but their guitarist got clipped by a car the day before and Wings Never Shattered got added hours before they were supposed to go on -- the setup ran on for most of the next hour. This gave me some time to hang out and start drinking, and also to browse through the Oak Knoll table, which is a convenient euphemism for "lose all my money". The gig turned into a free show due to issues with door control -- the venue wanted to keep their normal bar custom as well, I guess, and had another room on the second floor that they needed to have open -- but I still feel bad about not compensating the bands, as this was a good show at a venue that has a fair degree of potential.
Wings Never Shattered [4/7]
Fittingly enough, the replacement band came in at replacement level, which shows why the term exists; if WNS was better, they'd have been on the bill initially, instead of coming off the figurative bench when Id had to scratch. They were okay, but as metalcore goes, fairly generic; there were some good parts, but more that everyone has heard already five thousand times before. The potential is definitely there for this band to diversify or otherwise distinguish themselves, but this step just hasn't been taken yet. Also, the vagaries of their genre mean that whether or not they decide to take that next step up, they could be on the main stage at Metalfest next year, or they could spend their entire career playing gigs no bigger than this one. When the rules for success are so ridiculously nondeterministic, it's very difficult to see the effort to become more than 'good enough' as worth the candle. They were entertaining and they drew well, but the sets did strictly improve as the night went on.
Burn My Remains [5/7]
I'd heard a fair bit about these guys due to interest in other North Shore/Merrimac Valley bands, and they certainly didn't disappoint, pounding out a strong set of brutal death metal, filled in with just enough neoclassical melodics to really set themselves apart. I'm hoping to see them again in the future, though it doesn't seem that they travel much outside their home range -- though this is less of an issue if there are more good shows up here in the Blight. The only real issue here was that I couldn't entirely hear the bass; the bass lines tracked mostly with the rhythm guitar, but for a 8x10 cab, there ought to have been a little more sound coming out of it. The sound guy was also a last-second fill-in, but in the main did a good job, fillips like these aside.
Hekseri [6/7]
Though there were some issues with Megan's mic initially -- like it wasn't on or someone moving equipment across the floor had kicked the other end out of the soundboard -- this was a thoroughly strong and dominating set of thrashing black metal that even drew in the bouncers who were supposed to be watching the door to the upstairs to marvel not only at girls driving a sonic tornado, but also at Seth's relentless blastbeat pace. The floor was thinner for them, at least initially, as the only non-local band, but it filled in properly in short order, though some weaklings might have been intimidated off by Larissa getting on the floor and attacking people with her bass (a good time for the rest, though). While their set was a little clipped at the end -- the bar wanted the bands over at midnightish, maybe due to noise ordinances, so the delay in startup made a definite difference -- it was still pretty fully developed, and definitely kickass.
Shroud of Bereavement [6/7]
This is where the time limitations really hurt; Shroud came right out at an amazing level, and had this set run as long as it was probably intended to, would have gotten into the top echelon. Though the stage was crowded with the six bandmembers, including three guitarists, it definitely made a difference, as this sort of doom metal really requires that kind of wall of sound to crush over the audience and get their full attention. The strongest comparison is probably to Novembers Doom, as a similar inheritance from multiple sources strongly reworked, but there were also parts where I couldn't help but notice the resemblance to Nightingale. Since he lives in Sweden and doesn't tour so much any more, local bands that can evoke a similar depth and maturity are definitely worth your attention. Though they did get cut off a little, this was still a great performance, and I'm going to make a point to see them in the future.
Unfortunately, I didn't stick around either to pick up Shroud's CDs or to go to Dan's after-party, both of which I should have; like a goober, I parked at the T station again, and like a goober, I was worried about getting towed or shit. I've got to either start parking smarter or caring less, as I still had to scoop slush off my car and drive home over windy back roads, but I did it short two discs from an awesome band and without further metal socialization. Not fun.
Now, shows from this past weekend:
1349 with Goatwhore, Nachtmystium, and Averse Sefira...and Mortis Deveia, Aura of Aquila, Zircon, and Cold Northern Vengeance
Mark's, Bedford, 3/31/2007
--
I had to bag a party for one of my high school friends in order to get up for this, but friends who've stayed around where they've been their whole life will tend to stay there; 1349 comes and goes, and the chance to see them on a small stage rather than out in front of 20,000+ ragers through crappy PA towers (like I will this summer) is something that does not occur a whole lot. However, as things panned out, I probably could have dropped in and said hi before going up, but of course there was no way to know that at the time.
Doors were reported for 6, and I got up there around 6:15, fully expecting to go in and find that I'd missed a couple local openers, because this is Mark's, and their ridiculous pay-to-play policy and its attendant circumstances have led to the running gag in the scene that doors for any Mark's show are at about 10 AM on the day before, and that by the time anyone actually gets there, they have already missed half of the 1500 local openers. Your band has just been added to this show, and you need to sell 15 tickets, even though this event is now in the past. However, wonder of wonders, the local support had been frozen at four bands, all of whom were quite good, and doors was actually delayed for soundchecking for the touring acts. So I stood around outside for a bit and talked some with Henry (Mortis Dev) and then briefly with Paul (CNV), who was then working on rounding up his band and understandably a little chafed about having to go on first. Given the circumstances under which CNV got on this show, it's perhaps not surprising that the club would do this, but looking at this bill and how the lineup fell together -- and also, to a lesser degree, what kinds of performances were delivered -- it makes a lot more sense commerically than it does artistically or socially. Somebody always has to go on first, because otherwise the show just fails to start, but on this occasion it should not have been CNV.
Eventually, they let us in, and after getting a beer I went down to the second-stage end to make sure that I didn't miss any CNV. I didn't, even including their initial start, which got cut off because they were still soundchecking up on the main stage. Though they were able to get their sound dialed in, they were notified after this that they'd start playing in 20 minutes. This is far too long to leave metalheads in the vicinity of three full merch and distro tables; I need to train my wallet better so that it doesn't immediately jump up and start vomiting money all over the dealers' hands in this situation. I'm more than satisfied with picking up everything Moonsorrow's ever done that I didn't have yet, plus some other rarities, but it was tough slapping it down enough to still be able to support the local and touring bands. Sure, it's all the same metal scene, but direct support is a lot better than having it routed through some sub-licensor label in Russia.
Eventually, CNV started around 8ish. If I'd dropped in on Jay's, I probably could have seen most of their set, but I had no way of knowing a Mark's show would start this late, and I'd feel pissed about missing any part of CNV in any case.
Cold Northern Vengeance [6/7]
CNV's Arising Dungeon Cult is one of the best black metal records from the North American continent, in its clarity and atmospheres as much as in its rawness and starkness. Live, with imperfect control over their sound (the second stage at Mark's is really good, but it's still a second stage at a bar), the stress is more on the raw aspects, presenting a different sound, but one no less cool or less black metal. Though it still hadn't really gotten dark when they started, if you closed your eyes at any point in the set, it wasn't hard to immediately infer the kind of frigid and snowing night as when they should have played supporting Enslaved. It was a great experience, probably the truest set of the night, and, of course, full of kickass music; they closed with "A Past Forgotten", and there was not a song the rest of the night more frigid or more epic.
As good as this set was, though, their support for Watain and Angelcorpse in Boston next month should be even more interesting, as there are a lot more antifas in Boston than in New Hampshire, so some might show up, even though you very seldom get antifas at a black metal show. I believe Paul in his assertions that CNV isn't a political band, and because I also believe in Amon Amarth's live-and-let-live-as-long-as-they-also-live-and-let-live approach to the right, I'm not going to stir shit with their more politicized fans, but some of the more political on the other end might. Burzum, Nokturnal Mortum, and even Graveland kit I can understand, but when you show up to a black metal show wearing Skrewdriver gear or shirts explicitly advertising racially-oriented forums, it's pretty obvious that it's being done for polemical or recruitment purposes. People have a right to believe whatever they want, as long as they aren't forcing it on others, but I'm not sure that the streets of Cambridge will take that view.
Political bullcrap aside, CNV is still awesome, and I'm still, obviously, looking forward to seeing them again, even though Boston in May is necessarily going to be much less grvm than New Hampshire, anytime.
Averse Sefira [5/7]
The venue was still filling up, so I was able to basically turn around from CNV and walk straight up to the stagefront. This was good and bad; I was, indeed, right the hell up front, but as a result I'm not sure that I got the optimum sound out of the experience. This was still a really good set, but they had the misfortune to be bracketed between two stellar locals, and while they aren't as thoroughly derivative of early Emperor now as on the earlier recorded stuff that I've heard from them, they haven't completely differentiated themselves either. If Zircon hadn't been on the bill, this would have been the most death-driven set (well, of the actual black metal bands, anyways), but unfortunately, they had to cut in between a band that evokes the spirit of old Norway better than they do, and one of the most complete crushing machines that the Northeast has to offer. After another record, they'll probably have their feet under them better, but on this night, Averse Sefira was just really good in a setting where there was a lot of greatness available.
Zircon [6/7]
I was playing around with the idea of doing split scores, and had I actually gone through with it, Averse Sefira would have come out with a 5.5 and these guys with a 6.5. As the last time, they absolutely slaughtered; just an excellent performance, little short of the transcendant. If you live in New England and like the sound of a Naglfar-Dissection-Zyklon fusion, you need to get to the show or shows that Zircon is doing within easy driving distance of you over the next two weeks (don't ask me where, just check your local bills, everyone knows Zircon is on every show); everyone else, either hit up the Oak Knoll mailorder or wait for Jeremy to upsell them to Candlelight or Relapse or something.
Nachtmystium [6/7]
I hadn't heard anything from these guys, but was looking forward to seeing them anyways; new and different music is always a good thing. of course, it's debatable how much was new and different in the set of black'n'roll that they cranked through, inheriting more from Celtic Frost than from what Goatwhore would do a little later on, but it was quite well-executed and the crowd actually in front of the stage -- I was off to the side again, ahead but out of the way of the people who wanted to be front and center -- was thoroughly into it. If the black'n'roll sound puts down permanent roots in the US, so much the better, especially as a contrast to the current dominating school in USBM, but I really need to get out my Vried disc again and be sure what and how much the differences are. Of course, Vried wasn't on this bill, and this was a really good set regardless; I'll have to see them again at Metalfest to be sure that there wasn't any acoustic-shadow bits getting in the way of my understanding of their sound.
Aura of Aquila [5/7]
These guys are actually from my area (Danvers, close enough, even in ultra-parochial New England), and Jim was allegedly in [Endless] Ruin with Ryan and Danny et al (I don't really remember him, but I only saw them once and it was like 4 years ago). Though they had an interesting sound, it wasn't always completely together in performance, and anyone who knows anything about the New England black metal scene would have to conclude that they were slotted where they were for commercial reasons, pushed this late so that people who bought tickets from them would stay at the club, buying drinks, at least through more than half the gig rather than seeing them and leaving early in order to avoid driving an hour and more home at Police Harrassment O'Clock in the morning. They were decent, and I have to pick up a CD from them at some point -- forgot this time -- but even considering their innate qualities, and that this was the bass player's last show, they should have still gone on earlier rather than later, if only in favor of the more high-profile bands on the local half of the bill.
Goatwhore [7/7]
Your eyes are not deceiving you, though I sure thought my ears were while watching the set. Despite the fact that Goatwhore at this point is, as commented (by the bassist from CNV), total Celtic Frost worship, there's nothing wrong with such when it's delivered with such absolute power and such amazing clarity of sound, especially since Celtic Frost isn't exactly doing this early-period sound themselves any more. About equal parts black'n'roll and old Frost, even down to Tom Warrior-style "ugh!" exclamations, this was by a long ways the best performance that I've seen from Goatwhore, and while they aren't particularly revolutionary in anything they do, they're definitely always entertaining, which is the goal to be aspired to for such perpetual road warriors; sometimes you just get a decent set, and sometimes you get an amazing one like this one, but you know they're always going to at least put on a good performance.
Mortis Deveia [5/7]
The Henry Khiev Show [7/7]
While the comments outside the show before doors from some of the other fans that Mortis Dev "didn't fit" on this bill were good for lulz -- because Henry and I were standing less than ten feet away from the people making them, apparently invisible or something -- they were also true to a certain degree; Mortis Deveia is not a black metal band, and they were principally on the bill for two reasons: first, they kick ass, and second, they draw a lot of people from the Valley who might not otherwise show up for a black metal show. Accordingly, they went on a lot later than I was expecting them to, to keep those extra bodies in the venue and drinking and tipping as long as possible. Their set was decent, and fairly high-energy, but there was very much the feeling of a fairly standard-form NWOSDM-driven thrash band riffing out, with occasional intermissions where Henry would do something incredible with his axe. It's not at the Joe Stump level, but it's also not nearly as balanced as some of the other local bands with sick lead guitarists that I follow. As a career pessimist, I can't see this as having good implications for future band chemistry, but there were some external factors that may have led to this being a down night for the other four members; I know I've seen better overall sets from them in the past, and hope to continue to see good sets from them in the future.
1349 [6/7]
The sound at the beginning of their set was oddly really quiet, much as with Dark Funeral the last time I was up here, and additionally I was standing over at the side of the stage, in a bit of an acoustic shadow, which pushed the sound that much lower and less clear for me. Despite this, the band soldiered on and eventually got properly dialed in all across the hall after a couple songs, unleashing their take on the oldest and coldest of Norway over all those in attendance. It may be me misremembering Dark Medieval Times, but the feel as far as I could compare was closest to a more closed-in and aggressive early Satyricon -- though Frost was not on the drums, at least at this gig, for reasons of undisclosed origin that might be personal as well as legal. (Frost allegedly beat the crap out of some guy over a girl or something back in the early '90s, and as a result has a felony assault charge on his rap sheet; perhaps not as significant as Jon Nodtveit or Bard Eithun's Murder Two convictions, but still problematic for the INS or whatever they're calling it these days.) It was still a kickass performance and a fitting capstone to the night, even if it wasn't quite as well-presented as Goatwhore's unexpectedly killer outing; black metal, even the kind that crosses the seas to play gigs, thrives on making people fight through the circumstances to the quality music beneath, and there was certainly plenty of good stuff here.
Eventually, of course, they had to close up, and since Mark's has learned their lesson about putting local bands on after the headliners (at least when the tour is as relatively inexpensive as this one), it was time to head home through the cop-ridden roads and highways down to the border and freedom from dunnage. While Louis from Goatwhore is certainly right that as soon as you stop supporting shows, you'll start bitching about how nothing good ever comes around any more, it's better for all concerned to support shows at places besides Mark's. The security is inconsistent, not patting people down but throwing people out without warnings for moshing, the local support has to pay for the privilege of playing (on an admittedly well-tuned PA setup) at the back of the hall to mostly the same people who would be there at a bar or basement show that they would be getting paid for or at least not losing money on, and on leaving, people have to deal with New Hampshire's finest, who are an obstacle not only to those who are legitimately too impaired to operate, but also to anyone else they happen to decide is a likely mark. This may strike some people as harsh on NH cops, but these people don't have anyone in their family who got a $300 ticket for reckless operation for pulling over when directed by a police officer on an empty highway. New Hampshire extracts enough revenue from Massachusetts by selling liquor on Sundays and without state taxes; it's not strictly necessary to supplement this by pulling over anyone with Mass plates that they think they can hang a violation on, but it still happens.
This last one is from Sunday at ye goode olde Somerville watering hole & Chinese dining room. Note: the Skybar does not actually serve Chinese food, but they don't mind people taking in takeout from the Chinese place next door.
Deathamphetamine with Dominatus and Volatile
Skybar, Somerville, 4/1/2007
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In sharp contrast to the previous night's black metal festivities, this was a firmly grounded thrashout, but no less cool or possessed of less good music. There are a lot of high scores on the books for this weekend and nothing average or lower; maybe my standards are dropping, but the more likely conclusion is that the bands this weekend were just really that awesome.
Chastened by previous weeks, I made it down earlier and got there right at doors, in time to check in and go next door to pick up some Chinese, then come back and eat it before Volatile started up. It was a little close, but helped by the fact that the band delayed a little, potentially waiting for more people to show up, which I don't understand. The people, not the bands' reaction to them not showing; it's a Sunday evening, there's no football, so you come down, get some good Chinese food, drink some beers, and are done and can stand up sometime during the first band's set. It's not hard, y'all, and for the most part -- this one definitely included -- the Sunday shows at the Skybar have been really cool.
Volatile [6/7]
lol Volatile moar liek Vo-latile amirite lol
Now that the Encyclopedia Dramatica-style description is out of the way, it's time to be moderately serious, as the band is; they're not doing a 3 Inches of Blood-style piss take with their interpretations of primal thrash, but they definitely still are having fun with it, as it's fun music. If you go through your collection in alphabetical order you can find a lot of similarities: Venom, Vio-lence (viz the joke above), Volatile. While the focal point is still on their covers and the frantic passion that they execute them with, their originals are steadily improving, and there's a few that can stand in with their takes on Slayer and Kreator's early periods without losing out in quality or intensity. They're still developing as an original band, but they're already fully formed in their handling of other people's material, and the good reaction to their insanity in executing it seemed to feed forward into their confidence and project the later originals in the set stronger. Volatile may not ever stop playing a long slice of covers, but there may well come a day when people will wish they didn't, in order to give more time to their original work.
Volatile played as a four-piece, though I could almost swear that they had another guitarist when I saw them at Great Scott. The sound wasn't materially degraded for it, but if they're currently normally a five-piece, they're just the latest in a long string of bands playing the Skybar a member down.
Dominatus [5/7]
Like Deathamphetamine, Dominatus is currently in lineup flux, but unlike Deathamphetamine, they weren't able to persuade the exiting member to show up for this gig. The bassist search continues, and the consequence for this set was an occasionally confused sound; the composition was strong enough that the absence of the low end tying things together did make a difference. The impression was of a decent death metal band in the brutal style most common to this area -- Bane of Existence is probably the closest -- trying to play with one hand tied behind its back, though the sound did get better and more together as the set wore on. They also made an interesting exception to the regular practice, covering "Hermod's Ride to Hel" off Amon Amarth's most recent record, which they did a good rendition of. Metal bands, as with practically everyone else, cover mostly old standards, with contemporary material rarely getting played; it's not really possible, in the age of the internet, to do like Metallica did and clone some far-off band to wow local audiences, but nobody's really doing that, either. This will hopefully lead to more contemporary covers in the few non-original slots available; there's a lot of good deep cuts out there that the bands who wrote them don't do live, and someone might as well play the ones that strike their fancy.
This one incidental bit definitely inspired me; if I revive Coelem with actual people as opposed to a studio project, any shortfalls in the set will be filled with uncredited (except in this notice) endZone and Solar Signs material, both because it's really cool and to see if I can get away with co-opting stuff from ten years ago in Russia that never even made much of a stir there. It's not going to happen, but that doesn't make it not a cool idea.
Deathamphetamine [7/7]
Slightly less epic and slightly more crossover-driven than when I saw them last, Deathamphetamine left nothing on the table for Ben's final gig on vocals before moving out of state. Though there was a lot of commentary from the band members about how much stuff they were fucking up, it wasn't immediately noticeable, as the band for the most part stayed together and in time, and throughout laid down a battering barrage of variously-influenced thrash-death. They also got one of the longest sets I've seen from a local show; chalk that one up to three bands on a nearly-three hour timetable and quick setchanges. The result was a mad frenzy of headbanging and flailing limbs, driven up in intensity by action as well as invective from Rich (IWEIPH), who is also not long for this coast. It was a great set, one of the few at this place where the band has gone down off the stage to thrash along with the crowd, and the second-craziest in terms of forward motion to the last time I saw Goreality here, because this time I was the one getting knocked into the table, and I was able to catch it before it fell all the way over. Good times, and hopefully the band will pick up a suitable vocalist in short order so that they can continue rolling on. It'll be tough to replace Ben, but that's also what they said about Taneli Jarva, and Sentenced did okay once Ville got on the same page with the rest of the band.
Though things got over kind of early, despite the long sets, I still left shortly after nabbing Deathamphetamine's CD, overdue by about 5 months through nobody's real fault, except maybe the band's, indirectly, for not realizing how fast their awesomeness would run through their initial pressing. Can't go wrong with 18 tracks of Deathamphetamine for 3 bucks, but I also did have to go to work in the morning and finally take my car in for repairs; after it gets the new bumper, I can start subtly stickering it, which I hadn't done before due to the fact that it was popped and needed replacing.
In other show news, Revocation has been added to the NEMHF. This is the best news about the festival since I found out that there were a lot more bands that I didn't care about playing than bands that I really don't like. They're playing Friday, and they're probably going to be mired on the second stage, but they're still going to be blowing large cavities into the poser hordes and hopefully catching the ear of some of the industry types who are always about. The only downside to this is that now I need to add two offensive-lineman-style knee braces to my festival expenses. \m/.
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