Pics from the High on Fire/ Priestess show

Lately I like it loud. Shaking muscle away from bone loud. Loud enough to forget what I was trying to forget about. Ear abuse, mind in use. Is there anything louder than a High on Fire/Priestess/Black Cobra/Bison B.C. show? No! Unless you've had your head in a jet engine recently. Here are some pics from this show...held in the Bingo Basement room of the First Unitarian Church in downtown Philadelphia. I really wanted to ask the guys in "Priestess" if this was their first "church gig" but I didn't get the chance. I was wrapped tightly in a tinnitus blanket and wouldn't have heard the answer anyway.

Enjoy...

Armed with Photos (from SXSW)

I've been back for several days riding on the fumes of a great 4 days in Tejas.  So before I post some photos, let's recap.
These are the bands I think you should check out from a variety of genres: Some you should already know, some you'll be very afraid of. There are a few I have not mentioned in previous posts, so pay attention.

Dead Confederate(Athens, Ga.)
Who Made Who(Copenhagen, Denmark)
I Wrestled A Bear Once(Shreveport. LA)
Township(Boston, Ma)
Priestess(Montreal, Quebec)
Tobacco (main man from Black Moth Super Rainbow: Pittsburgh, PA)
Trampled By Turtles (Duluth, MN)
High On Fire (Oakland, CA)
Sleepy Sun(San Francisco, CA)
Scorpion Child(Austin, TX)
Trash Talk (Sacramento, CA)
The Jim Jones Revue( England)
Mondo Drag (Davenport, Iowa)


If you look under a rock, you will find rock.
Teach your children
Bring them to festivals
Take away their video games, and all will be well.   Just look what I found.

Less preach, more pics!

                                                       Matt Pike: High on Fire (10 strings!)

                                                          Gordie Johnson (Big Sugar, Grady)

                                                        The Meat Puppets!

                                                     Flatstock Poster Show

                                                                   Township

                                                                   The Bronx

                                                              The Jim Jones Revue

                                                                     Priestess

                                                       Metal Mom @ Voivod Show

                                                          Trampled By Turtles!

                                                         Howl @ Attitude Adjustment Party

                                                Dead Confederate @ Obscure Magpie Party

                                                              Mog Party People

                                            Perez Hilton w/ some guy who wants to be Justin Timberlake

SXSW Day 1

 First of all and most importantly:  Rest in Peace Alex Chilton...your absence here in Austin will be felt. You brought such joy and influence to anyone who appreciated the best power pop ever to bleed out of an amp....such sad news. I will hum "Thirteen" all through the day today.

-Sat next to some uber hipster girls with perfect bangs and re tailored thrift shop clothes, The conversation leaked in and out of my ears as the ambien pulled me under:  My ex is a totalitarian extremist. he's 37, thats kind of old.  My parents used to take family trips up the coast to Seattle and would casually drink bottles of beer all the way there...I used to be able to make a ring out of a dollar bill, I can't imagine being bothered by having my sleep interrupted to go change a diaper...I brought my piccolo.................

Airport, Austin:  a limo driver holding up a sign with the name :BEERE.  I took it as a sign of my own.

-picked up by my dear friends Alex,James and Steven.  Gangs all here. Talked about the good times and stopped at Spec's for a critical beer run.

Was shown my accommodations: a 1968 Airstream trailer. Heaven.

Took the bike Alex lent me down to the thick of things. The last time I rode a bike, I remember my dad taking the training wheels off and saying "You can do it Sean!"

Locked the bike and felt an adrenalin rush like no other.  You might think it was because of the incoming onslaught of infinite music choices...no. I was looking for the goddamn taco truck. The holy grail of Austin texas .  Walked up and down the main drag on 6th...NO TACO TRUCK.  Who is in charge here.  Look at all of the beards.  Where's the pile of free beer?  Oh yes... i remember now...beer happens for free at the DAY parties....It was 7pm on St. pattys day and needed to fill the taco hole...the taco negative space....with a 4 dollar PBR.

Music:  Got the news that i was on the bands list for the Action/PR Showcase at Mohawk......So it was there I went and stayed. I was feeling so metal, wearing black, sporting beard, a mild waft of BO eminating from beneath my jeans
First Band:  Mondo Drag : an excellent young psych rock band from davenport Iowa.
Next: Naam- fromm Brooklynn......Toooo muchhhhh reverbbbbbb and songs so slow and buried in sound that time stopped long enough to make me think of the missing taco truck again.
Next: Bison from Vancouver- A crushing  wave of riff and uppercut rhythms on repeat. cascading over a whipped up crowd. So loud that beer vibrated in my tummy and the guitarist blew his 1000 watt head.
Next:  Gates Of Slumber from "the midwest". Three beefy guys that looked like a team of Wrestlemania ringers who always lose to the stars of the ring....proceeded to surprise everyone with some shredding just south of Iommi and drumming like an amped up Gatlin gun.
Next: Zoroaster:  doom, the record is on slow, walking to the gates of Hades in slow motion...smoke machines...bass slung so low it was hitting the floor............tacos, tacos.
Priestess:  been waiting for this one. A great Montreal metal band with a real live singer who climbs up the register while punishing his SG and bigsby.  New album: Prior to the Fire rocks the rivets off of my denim....they slayed it.   Burly tattooed women got closer to the dreamy singer as the set wore on. Drummer could have broken a ride cymbal with one more blow.
and Finally....High On Fire. The loudest band on earth.Run for cover. Hide the women and children. Matt Pike plays a 10 string guitar!!!!! The pit swirled like a dizzy and rabid dog as tinnitus overcame the faithful..a rumble of epic proportion, a viking crying out for more war, a crack in the earth beneath the stage. That's metal, right down to my bubbling marrow. new album Snakes for the Divine so loud it could down a fighter jet.

Rode the bike home, a UT student with 60 pounds on me whizzed by in the bike lane..I.wheezed and coughed all the way back..where's my breath machine.......to bed in the airstream, dreaming of cross country travel on an interstate, in the airstream  chasing a taco truck.

The Origins of "Cookie Monster" Vocals

Downtime allows a hollow mind to wander deeper into the still seas of useless information, picking away at thoughts, ideas and questions that float meaningless like plankton in an aimless school. This unwelcome guest has yours truly deep sea diving into calm oceans of music minutia, peeking into oceanic caves of unwanted bottom fed factoids....

Recently I've been on a very heavy music cruise through somewhat uncharted territory. My fists and teeth remain clenched most of the day to choke out the stress in hopes of safely erupting in release, and even though I have no real stereo system in place( wouldn't work with a 3 1/2 year old and a wife who prefers everything "music" without distortion) I get my kicks and metal licks on in the car and the trusty ipod...and through my metal research which may or may not make me look like a purist or a fogey, I see how time turns a page..The heavy I grew up with (AC/DC, Motorhead, Sabbath, Maiden) remain cornerstones to my interstate steering wheel drum solos..but there is so much out there that makes the sheer volume created by those bands seem like waiting room easy listening, like frat boy/token karaoke choice hard rock...So many genres to explore....and so much time. Grindcore, Death, Speed, Sludge, Progressive, Industrial, Black, Thrash, Drone, Doom and Stoner....and the splintered hybrids that that make grunge and post punk look downright passe, and blissfully hopeful.

There are a few common threads that weave their way into and settle roughly into the blueprint and spirit of the bulk of the genres of metal and their capillaric multitudes....black t-shirts, furrowed brows and "cookie monster vocals". 

You might have heard them by accident if you happened to be around a young boy with a cheap walkman, earbuds bleeding, who was rocking a Cattle Decapitation t- shirt and on his way to school with some mysterious bulk in his trenchcoat.  You might have wondered how anyone could interpret something that sounded like a muppet getting choked out......and so did I. 

I'm a vocalist. I know how hard it is to "find your voice" in a style and key one is comfortable with. It takes years of practice, mimicry..and focus. I know that the rest of you gravitate toward some kind of melody that makes you want to get off of that bar stool and do your best Bad Company white man dance.  But there are millions of people out there who couldn't care less about anything that came out of a singers throat that didn't sound like a dog coughing up blood.
 I have always been intrigued with the meaning and the message of vocals and lyrics. As a lyricist, I know that it is much harder to tell stories, create characters and soul search as one who writes lyrics, than it is to just sing them. You have to make your words fit with the way you intend to interpret the melody you have created. You have to find melodic ways to accentuate your words, through phrasing and emotion.
With so many genres using a vocal style that sounds like black static, I wondered if so many metal fans even cared about lyrics at all. I needed to find out the origin of the "death growl" as it is properly known as...in order to appreciate it more....Here is what I found:

Death growls are sometimes criticised for their "ugliness". However, death growls are just as much an aesthetic to death metal as an instrument, particularly due to the percussive nature of this kind of singing; its harsh, brutal nature is in keeping with death metal's often dark and disturbing subject matter.

OK..makes sense.. alot of what I heard sounds like Captain Caveman beating his chest at last call..which is very percussive.

Most "correct" growls use either a variation of vocal fry or false vocal chords. Death growls are often referred to as an overtone style of screaming, and while tonally very different, the majority of "good" growling techniques apply the same principles that are witnessed in "clean" vocals. These principles include timing and cues, holding a note (or gurgle) for a certain amount of time without it fraying, and being able to scream rhythmically underneath the growl while alternating between different pitches if necessary. The changes in pitch are more prevalent in the less  styles. Some notable examples of vocalists who use alternating pitches in their vocalisation are Mikael Ackerfeldt of Opeth, Mille Petrozza of Kreator, Chuck Billy of Testament, Jason Mendonca of Ackercocke and Chuck Schuldiner of Death.

Apparently, its a science like any other style of singing. Which is head scratchingly cool, I guess. Except..how do you warm up for a show? Bleach instead of salt water? Cold mead instead of warm tea? Is there a growl scale? Do growlers ask a roadie to punch them in the throat right before the lights go down?

The advent of the growl as it is used today coincided roughly with the gradual emergence of death metal, and it is thus difficult to pinpoint a specific individual as the inventor of the technique. Different vocalists likely developed the style over time. The band Death (and its precursor Mantas) with its two vocalists — initially Kam Lee and subsequently Chuck Schuldiner — have been cited as among the first (although Schuldiner would eventually switch to a more high-pitched screeching). Possessed are also considered by some to be one of the earliest bands to employ growls, as are Necrophagia and Master. Around the same time, bands such as Hellhammer, with Tom G. Warrior on vocals, and seminal act Massacre also employed a variation of the growl. The vocalists from the British grindcore band Napalm Death — consecutively Nic Bullen, Lee Dorrian and Mark "Barney" Greenway — further developed the style in the late 1980s, adding more aggression and deeper guttural elements to it, while also speeding up delivery of the lyrics. Another singer who gradually deepened his voice into the growling used today ondeath metal and grindcore was Chris Barnes, original singer of Cannibal Corpse. On the band's video biography, he says that he wanted to sing as high as Rob Halford, but his voice was too low pitched for that. So he started trying to blend it with the other instruments, coming up with a dark and really low guttural voice that became his signature.

This is fascinating! Just as rock has its vocal stars like Plant, Mercury, Daltrey who sing and metal has its stars as well..Dickinson, Halford and King Diamond......who sing really high......death, black, grind has its superstars as well...Schuldiner, Warrior, Dorrian and Barnes who essentially became growlers to become an extension of the low crushing(and sometimes speeding) instrumentation around them.

And that was just the first wave that set sail from the low point of commercial metal in the 80s...separating itself from the pitiful playfulness and the prettiness of Hair Metal and faux glam..with an answer and promise of darkness,death, speed and seriousness. The growler was the absolute antithesis of the ridiculous money grabbing spandex crooner. Chris Barnes was the devious dark lord to Vince Neil's "heavy metal" angel. I get it now!

With some the modern metal bands I'm getting into today..Baroness, Kylesa, High On Fire, Saviours, Coalesce, Mastodon, Black Cobra, Bison B.C., Dethklok,....the grunt can sometimes be raised or lowered to a gutteral scream..like gargling glass...and I can pick out some bits of lyric here and there beneath the magma splattering riffage that may accompany it. Some of the newer heavy bands making my scene have singers and brave attempts at melodic delivery like Early Man, The Sword, Three Inches of Blood, Priestess, Red Fang, Valient Thorr and Naam. Either way,I'm enjoying the built out neck muscles of a man half my age with the sweaty succession of headbanging sessions.(great lyric).  Sometimes, even as I've lived as a hard working vocalist/lyricist....that is all that matters........

And that is your useless piece of rock lore to ponder on today.  Cheers and beers!