Tag: metal

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Music Music Blog

Ghoul and Phobia at the Hi-Tone May 26th

CREDIT: Ghoul play the Hi-Tone this Tuesday.

Ghoul play the Hi-Tone this Tuesday.

Ghoul is made up of quasi-anonymous Bay Area death metal/grindcore scene veterans that bring a refreshingly riotous sense of humor to the frequently too-serious metal scene. Taking more than a few cues from GWAR, to whom Ghoul have provided tour support in the past, the four gentlemen credited as Digestor (guitar, vocals, razor hooks and mosh riffs), Dissector (same, plus skateboards and something we’ll skip over right now), Cremator (bass, vocals, plus bone torch, something else we won’t be mentioning), and Fermentor (drums, rot gut, beserker beats) know a little something about making solid crossover thrash metal with the occasional vocal detour into the death metal arena.

But there’s so much more going on here: Ghoul’s discography of four full-length albums, last year’s six-song Hang Ten EP, and several splits with like-minded outfits (plus a 7″) provides the musical backdrop to a brilliant combination of KISS-style attention-getting tactics and new-media savviness that’s a reliable one-way ticket to amassing a cult following. The band’s elaborate fictional back-story, told lyrically throughout the progression of releases but REALLY entertaining as it comes together on their website and YouTube, stars the four band member personas as the perpetually-hooded characters they assume onstage and on record as well as a supporting cast of fellow “Creepsylvania” residents (the town’s history, as written on the site, is a must read). And to those unfamiliar or curious, the “Ask Cremator” page features four ten-minute clips (in “Ghoul’s Burning Questions” series of YouTube episodes) of the namesake member replying in advice-column style to fans who have called “the catacombs” at the number provided. Let me assure you…this is FUNNY stuff, but in no way suitable for the workplace or mixed company and perhaps only enjoyable for those with at least a passable knowledge of metal culture and history.

A couple of great things about Ghoul: Despite this degree of thematic complexity and effort, the band never slides down the slippery slope into novelty, and lastly, their sense of humor shows a mastery of subtlety and self-deprecation. For instance, perusal of Ghoul’s Bandcamp page will find a fake debut album listed simply as “Lou Reed Collaboration”. Also, it is common knowledge in the metal community that Ghoul feature (or featured) members of Bay Area death metal/grindcore bands Impaled and Exhumed. Ghoul will be headlining their Weapons of Mosh Destruction Tour when they hit the Hi-Tone on Tuesday night and it’s worth mentioning a thing or two about Phobia, who will occupy the third slot in the lineup behind Nekrofilth and local metal stalwarts Incineration. Phobia is a Southern California grindcore/crust-punk institution that formed in 1990 and has spit out countless releases over the last 25 years while going through just as many former members with the very definition of a revolving lineup. Never compromising its brutal meat-and-potatoes grind and always on the socio-political (and Anarchic) tip aesthetically and lyrically, Phobia are legends in their own right and make an interesting musical contrast to the theatrical thrash of Ghoul. This will most assuredly be a night of across-the-board metallic intensity and entertainment that doesn’t come through town all that often. Admission is $10.

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Sound Advice: Santy Bringing Metal to the Hi-Tone 12/25!

Spend Christmas Eve with your mama and your greasy granny. They raised you. But by Christmas night, you’re gonna need a pound or two of hot metal. Hi-Tone is ready to pour a vat of molten XMAS steel all over your fancy sweater with Tanks and Heavy Eyes. You’ve earned this. Merry Christmas, pal.

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Music Music Features

To the Extreme

One reliable factor about shows of the “extreme metal” variety is that they come as a package. Unlike indie rock or Americana bands, extreme metal bands will plays gigs with at least three other groups on the ticket. That’s a lot of metal, and there exists no genre of music that harbors the number of sub- and micro-genres that metal does. To the untrained ear or to music fans who dislike the more intense corner of metal, Dying Fetus, Skeletonwitch, Demiricous, and the Absence — performing at the Hi-Tone Café Wednesday — might sound indistinguishable. This is not so. They each mine a particular style of unconventional metal.

Dying Fetus has stared at the glass ceiling since their formation in 1991. There’s only so far you can go with a name like that. Regardless, the band has grown a loyal following. Combining old-school American death metal with the noisier end of hardcore, they boast the arms-crossed, tough-as-nails promo photos and testosterone-heavy dynamics that mark a certain school of extreme metal.

The stars of the evening will undoubtedly be Skeletonwitch. Not only do they have one of the best names in metal, their unique amalgam of styles spans the past 30 years of above- and underground metal. While their output has been limited, what they have released so far — including Beyond the Permafrost (on eclectic extreme-metal safe house Prosthetic Records) — points to an interesting formula and future.

Let’s start with the melodic but breakneck duel guitar riffing and leads that bring to mind early Iron Maiden and, more specifically, Diamond Head’s classic Lightning to the Nations album from 1980. This sound begat the explosion of thrash metal that would start taking over the West Coast in the mid-’80s (Metallica, Slayer, Exodus, Death Angel, Megadeth), and one can hear a lot of that in Skeletonwitch’s attack. The quintet does its ’80s metal homework (which has nothing to do with big hair or the Sunset Strip) and keeps its grades up into the ’90s.

There are several attributes that put Skeletonwitch under the banner of extreme metal. Another umbrella term with a multitude of strains, extreme metal more often than not refers to the metal that resembles grindcore, death metal, black metal, or noisy experimental metal.

Skeletonwitch first made a major footprint on the underground in the late ’80s. Vocalist Chance Garnette can do the low-end troll grunt of death metal and immediately switch over to the high-pitched screech normally associated with Northern European black metal. He’s also the only member of Skeletonwitch without a nickname, the others being his brother Nate “N8 Feet Under” Garnette on guitars, Scott “Scunty D” Hedrick on guitars, Eric “Harry” Harris on bass, and Derrick “Mullet Chad” Nau on drums.

I don’t quite understand the meaning of “N8 Feet Under” or “Scunty D,” but I understand where their harmonious guitar relationship comes from. It comes from a love and combination of Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden, Helloween, Slayer, and the groundbreaking early-’90s melodic and technical prowess of Carcass and At the Gates. It results in riffs and solos that are fast, loud, furious, and put together like an engine, but they’re also unbelievably catchy.

The challenging nature of Garnette’s vocals is in slight contrast to the tunefulness of Beyond the Permafrost. Regardless, if you are at all curious as to what constitutes real metal, this is the band to check out. With an old-school thrash-metal logo, cover artwork by up-and-coming artist John Baizley (who is also in Southern metal saviors Baroness), and song titles like “Soul Thrashing Black Sorcery,” “Baptized in Flames,” and “Remains of the Defeated,” the package and presentation live up to the sound. I just can’t argue with an album cover that features a human skull with deer antlers piled high with snow. Live, the band is a beast (I had the pleasure of seeing them jump on a bill at Murphy’s last year), moving all over the stage — something that metal bands have an unfortunate tendency to avoid.

Also on the bill at the Hi-Tone is another combo that bows to the history of metal. Demiricous execute nothing new, though if their latest album, Two (Poverty), is any indication, they worship at the altar of Def Jam-era Slayer (Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, and Seasons in the Abyss), which I’ll take any day over the dimwitted Hot Topic/Warped Tour “metal” of bands like Avenged Sevenfold and Atreyu. Rounding out the evening’s lineup is the similarly minded revivalist thrash metal of the Absence, a band that, along with Demiricous, calls the venerable Metal Blade Records home.

So, as readers may have ascertained, this will not be a night for the weak-hearted or hearing-sensitive. For the most part, it is a snapshot of the extreme-metal underground as it stands in 2007. Too bad it’s missing Halloween by two weeks. That would have been the perfect storm of heavy-metal experiences.

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News

Ornamental Metal Museum “Repair Days” is This Weekend

Have these things ever happened to you? The kids have put a dent in your Nobel Prize trophy. That suit of armor you wear on weekends has a squeaky kink in the elbow joint. Or the special bondage cuffs have snapped a link.

Well, don’t just put up with these irritations. Take all your broken gold, silver, brass, bronze, tin — anything made of metal, really — to the National Ornamental Metal Museum this weekend, October 12-14, for their annual Repair Days.

Blacksmiths and artisans will look at whatever you’ve broken, give you a free estimate on the spot, and repair it — sometimes while you wait, though bigger projects may take a few days. As the museum says, “We repair everything but cats, cars, and broken hearts.”

For more information, visit the museum’s website.

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Music Music Features

AARGH!

Medium-profile metal shows still come in big packages, and the one offered Wednesday, April 4th, at the New Daisy Theatre is no exception. Putting Lamb of God, Trivium, Machine Head, and Gojira together on one bill in 2007 gives the fan of extreme and semi-extreme metal a lot to chew on, despite the possible lack of crossover fandom among these four acts. There are glaring differences in sound and background among these bands, but one thing that unites them — particularly Lamb of God and Trivium — is how they illustrate the current metal landscape, which allows acts with noncommercial sounds to achieve unheard-of levels of popularity.

Certainly, 2006 was a good year for Lamb of God. The Richmond, Virginia, foursome released Sacrament, their fourth album and second for a major (Epic), last August. It clocked a respectable 200,000 units before the end of the year. (By comparison, Mastodon’s Blood Mountain did 75,000 in the same amount of time.) Not bad for a band that used to be called Burn the Priest and hasn’t significantly compromised its sound, which mates the thrash of Slayer, the antagonizing, bar-fight swagger of Pantera, and the brutality of true death metal. Those numbers may not amount to much for a mainstream rock act, but this is no mainstream rock act. Without regular radio or MTV2 play, Lamb of God have cultivated a nice grassroots fan base. And, perhaps counterintuitively, the tremors currently rattling the music industry have actually been beneficial to bands like these. With popular artists, major labels are moving such pathetic numbers due to digital piracy and the fall of the big-box retailer that they are turning some attention to the rabid fandom that follow bands such as Lamb of God, along with the similarly minded Mastodon and Shadow’s Fall (both recently signed to majors).

More than any other band on this bill, Orlando’s Trivium are probably the mid-’00s answer to ’90s-style nü-metal, which doesn’t mean they incorporate hip-hop, or wear backward baseball caps, or write lyrics that rival a high school kid’s poetry, or sound anything like Korn. Instead, they incorporate more contemporary trends into the metal template, injecting emo-style singing and slicked-up posturing into a blueprint rife with traditional thrash

Lamb of God

(think early Metallica) and death-metal elements. In the end, they’re not too far from what punk label Victory Records (Comeback Kid, Aiden) is so adept at peddling. With a lack of real underground, long-suffering integrity or a challenging, original sound, Trivium could soon be at the forefront of a movement commercially and credibly similar to the one that desecrated the word “metal” a decade ago.

Machine Head have not always been the band that they are on the newly released The Blackening. Though, in fact, Machine Head were pretty close to being this band in 1992, when their thrashy, borderline death-metal debut, Burn My Eyes, garnered a degree of attention for combining those influences with a subtle salute to the burgeoning modern-rock explosion.

Machine Head were created from the ashes of the highly respected but slightly obscure late-’80s Bay Area thrash troop Vio-Lence. Not a bad set of credentials. But sadly, for a stretch of albums in the mid-’90s, Machine Head took a detour and got lost. They were the antithesis of extreme metal, soon becoming one of the many poster children of numbskull nü-metal. Machine Head even had a massive, awful hit in 1999 with the song “From This Day.” These days, the least convincing thing to read in metal music writing is another tale of an aging band returning to its more brutal roots, but this appears to genuinely be the case with The Blackening. Take out the thick 2007 production qualities and a sissy vocal misstep or two (think poor man’s Tool), and this record manages to capture the feel of classic technical thrash circa 1990, when thrash metal got really heavy and complex, such as with mid-period albums by the highly influential Death (the band) or Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss.

The relatively unknown and new-ish French band Gojira (the name is French for “Godzilla”) open the New Daisy show with a noise that will either confound or win over the crowds that are there to see the more established acts. With what may be the bill’s most interesting sound, Gojira’s lumbering riffage owes a debt or four to Isis and Neurosis, but the complex time changes speed up and complicate those band’s slower natures, creating a very odd form of technical death metal with serious progressive-rock overtones.

A little something for all fans of heavy and intense? Well, if your threshold for “heavy” and “intense” stops at the Deftones, Static-X, or System of a Down, you should know that this cross-section of modern metal is a step up in terms of quality and volume — so maybe it’s time to take a step up.