Last weekend, Nic and I went on a band field trip to watch some metal. A loaded bill at the Mission Ballroom saw Converge, Sanguisugabogg, Khemmis, and Suicide Cages opening for The Dillinger Escape Plan, who were reuniting with their original singer, Dimitri Minakakis.
“You guys having fun?” Minakakis asked the audience. “Fuck your fun.” And then the band tore into one of their early atonal, tempo-mutilating sonic sculptures.
The Dillinger Escape Plan’s music is about as fun as stepping on a Lego. It’s basically auditory hostile architecture. There are no choruses, no grooves, no harmonies, nothing to provide pleasure or relief or catharsis. When the guitars harmonize, they do so with minor seconds and flat fifths. Ouch. The only true joy in watching the Escape Plan is how five musicians could possibly play music so fragmented and jagged at such high speeds. Although I’ve spent some time with their catalogue, I was only able to differentiate the songs by their sound effects.
The mosh pit that had formed kept stalling out as the band transitioned time signatures, before settling into a loping ¾ time shuffle, the herky-jerky bobbing that crowds default to when the music’s rhythm doesn’t make sense.
A friend that Nic had brought to the show, a Sleep Token fan who was unfamiliar with TDEP, seemed baffled. I felt bad for him. This was not a show for metal normies.
Converge was the band to see. The veteran metalcore act has honed their live set into a diamond spear. A probably apocryphal story has Steve Jobs dropping an iPhone prototype into a fish tank and complaining about the few tiny bubbles coming out. There are no tiny bubbles coming out of a Converse set. That shit’s a solid brick. They assaulted the crowd with a barrage of tracks from across their 30-year catalog, as their album artwork flashed behind them. Frontman Jacob Bannon must sleep in a cryogenic chamber for how good he looks at 48, and how much sweat he expends on stage. I don’t know how someone can yell at the top of their lungs every night for 30 years without turning them into prosciutto, but he has figured it out.
Sanguisugabogg has a logo that’s even less comprehensible than their name. It’s a drippy, demented spirograph in the mold of most death metal brands, but even more magnificently illegible. The band plays old school death metal (with a touch of groove), but to a cartoonishish extreme, as if they’re trying to be the most death metal death metal band. Cookie monsters vocals, throat sounds, no bass. I couldn’t tell you a single lyric coming from muscle-bound frontman Devin Swank, but with song titles like “Testicular Rot” and “Necrosexual Deviant,” I probably don’t need to. Their snare drum sounded fantastic. Between songs, one of the guitarists implored the crowd to get in the pit and beat up on each other a bit.
Khemmis are one of Denver’s best bands, and the only band of the night that I could play for my parents and have them register it as music instead of sound pollution. They really do pull off their majestic guitar harmonies live.
Apologies to Suicide Cages, whose set I missed, though, considering one of our buddies, church fire, remixed one of your songs, I’m sure we’ll see you soon.
In my research (that should be in ironic quotation marks) on Black Sabbath last week, I came across a quote that Geezer Butler said about Sabbath’s misbegotten 1976 album Technical Ecstasy. In 2014, he told Uncut (which, despite the name, was not a magazine for the uncircumcised), “It’s not like now: if you’re a heavy metal band, you put out a heavy metal album. Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up.”
I think the difference between then and now is that rock bands were pop artists, and pop artists had, and have, an obligation to keep up with the Joneses.
As the center of modern popular music pings between country, dance, R&B, and hip-hop, our savviest pop stars adjust their careers on the fly to stay ahead of their audiences. Taylor Swift ditches country. Beyonce and Post Malone embrace it. Lady Gaga reassembles herself into a funk robot. In the best case scenario, a pop star adjusts their sound and not only retains their current audience, but welcomes a whole new one.
This doesn’t really happen with rock music anymore.
As the center of music culture has drifted from rock bands to pop stars, rock bands aren’t as incentivized to reinvent their sound. Instead of appealing to a new audience, rock bands are encouraged to dig deeper into their own specific sound, to own their specific niche.
That’s how we get 30 years of The Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge. Although both bands have flexed within their genre (TDEP’s biggest was smuggling pleasant-sounding choruses into otherwise cubist songs), neither band tried to be something they were not. They certainly never ventured far enough outside their comfort zone to consider their music anything other than metal.
This week’s Heck Record is my favorite High on Fire record, De Vermis Mysteriis. Honestly, it could’ve been Snakes for the Divine or Luminiferous or any of their other six albums, because they’re all pretty much the same. And they all fucking rock. Maybe I just like the artwork on De Vermis Mysteriis the best.
Fire’s guitarist/front man/archduke/khan Matt Pike – great name – doesn’t fuck around with High on Fire. In the tradition of Motörhead, Fire is a power trio who make hard rocking metal. Each album includes a slow grinding song and one that uses a weird scale, but the rest are full-throated, roaring metal. Pike writes about swords, demons, conspiracies, mental illness, addiction, the Bible, H.P. Lovecraft, nuclear war…you know, metal stuff. And, like Motörhead did, High on Fire releases albums every couple of years.
They are never not metal.
To be more precise, they are never not fast, sludge metal. High on Fire owns the lane on fast, sludge metal. Thou and Neurosis make sludge metal, but it’s rarely fast. Power Trip and Slayer make fast metal, but it’s rarely sludge. High on Fire is the premiere fast, sludge metal band in the world. They picked their genre and specialized. Just like Converge is the best mathy metalcore band in the world. Just like The Dillinger Escape Plan is the best band in the world at making unsuspecting listeners throw their headphones across the room. Fuck your fun.
