Alright, updates should be back to normal now that, as of tomorrow, my school year is done (finally). And yeah, Tuesday updates aren't "normal", but I know all 4 of you are pining for something new to sate your need for my inimitable prose.
Normally, we all know the role of an opening band: to waste time before you get to see the band you paid to see. Ok, or bands the headliner respects and wants to expose to a wider audience, whatever. But by and large, these are not particularly groups you care about (my last show review completely notwithstanding, mind you.) Well, and to break some internal structure and acknowledge those last parentheses, this line-up was another exception: thee almighty eco-friendly epic black metal ensemble
Wolves in the Throne Room, supported by
A Storm of Light,
Krallice and
Thrones (just in case you didn't read the title, natch.)
A Storm of Light are a Neurosis-worshipping trio who, unsurprisingly, feature the ex-visuals... guy (visualist? visionary? visionsman?) from Neurosis themselves, who has also served stints in
Red Sparowes and
Battle of Mice, so the sludgy-credentials here are at
waste-thick ooze out of
that scene in Saw III with all the pig guts. (Which reminds me, I just saw Saw V, and how bullshit was that? (Along with Saws II-IV, mind you (but I digress!). Part of me wanted to think "
oh my god, this is going to be so boss! And this album art is bomb, too, this will be the best damn thing since Isis!", while part of me knew that "
all of these post-Neurosis bands are the same, ugh." Well, the latter turned out to be true, and while the female guest-vocals gave them some distinction, its by-and-large the same pseudo-atmospheric dirge tuned to drop-whatever.
(However, I did pick up their gorgeous
Primitive North split with
Nadja for a cheapo $20 (and you all laughed when I put off buying it!) and it's definitely worth your time, especially for the sidelong Nadja blissy, fuzzed-out drone that they do oh so well.)
Krallice were definitely set to impress, too, since they're the closest thing to a black metal supergroup since the short-lived
Twilight, although curiously none of the members have any blackened credentials: the "ex-member of..." rollcall includes Astomatous, The Flying Luttenbachers, Orthrelm, and, inarguably the biggest draw, Colin Marston, of Behold... the Arctopus and several more-or-less interchangeable post-everything tech-wank bands. While I expected some sort of iffy, tech-black sort of deal, I was pleasantly surprised that there was nothing overly showy and the emphasis was on fierce, riff-heavy black metal. Shame about the minor sound problem (the vocals would overpower the stage-right speaker), but done well enough to spark my interest in the band. Well done.
By this point it seems like I could devote an entire entry to just listing the former projects of the acts on this bill: take
Thrones, the solo project of Joe Preston. It would probably be easier to list the bands he hasn't worked with, but his resume includes tenures with the Melvins, High on Fire, Earth and Harvey Milk. And when you've played jackhammer on a Sunn O))) track, then no one will ever question your bad-assery again (and since apparently a bunch of you are questioning just how boss this guy is, he's loaded his everything with
fucking bears.) Stylistically he was the odd-man out, opening with a lengthy drone/doom sort of thing that audibly confused some of the crowd, but this sort of thing is right up my alley, and goddamn did he make an oppressive layer of noise just looping his bass and fiddling with some samplers. Immensely powerful drones, followed by some extremely Melvins-esque "stoner rock" or whatever the tag is that one gives meaty-sounding, low-end heavy hard rock.
And finally,
Wolves in the Throne Room have come out of whatever backstage ritual they were performing before the show and... well, carry it onto stage, as they dimmed the lights, lit candles, and cranked the fog machine to 11 to create a wicked atmosphere; this is how black metal is meant to be heard. For a bunch of outsider pseudo-hippies, Wolves can, to put it lightly,
tear your fucking head of with raw black energy. Incredibly tight and remarkably aggressive compared to some of their recorded output, they were able to get heads a-banging' more thoroughly than any other band on the bill. (As a side note, $15 shirts are definitely the way to go; way to go, guys.)
For an open-minded metalhead, I'd dare you to find a better evening for $18.
Yeah, doom-laden blacksludge. It's the sort of record you have to slowly peel and grind off your skin after listening to it - it will do everything in its power to suffocate, bruise, drown, and otherwise oppress you and if you're the kind of cat who's still around after reading that genre checklist and soaking in that beautifully bleak cover art then you're the ideal to candidate to be locked up in that shack yourself (look closer & don't come back until you see it). Luckily, Vit are a part of the movement in black metal that has, sadly, only really come around recently, wherein a) outside influences are a-okay, and b) "oppressive" and "bruising" don't mean triple-digit BPM all the way through (wait, is that a-okay? Am I being untrue? Can black metal be "a-okay"?). The draw here, and what makes this album infinitely more engaging, is the use of dynamics. The slow passages, the clean passages, the ambient passages - once the riff does kick in, it's a hundred times more brutal after being teased at for minutes at a time. Likewise, there's a huge doom influence, making this a fairly plodding record throughout (plodding as a positive thing, natch) meaning that when the tempo is dialed up it's all the more electrifying. Really, I can't remember the last time "sort of fast" was this thrilling, but it just speaks to the expert sense of pacing from start to finish. Thrilling in a "I wish I was dead" sort of way.
