FOLIO
by Jack Diablo
July 20, 2009
On any given Monday, you can get your weekly dose of metal at Shantytown as DJ Methadonnie serves up selections from his massive collection during Metal Mondaze. Taking it to the next level, the good people at Dead Tank booked an impressive lineup of bands to play loud and proud to start the week off right.
Hot Graves, out of Gainesville play doomy thrash metal. It’s basically old school punk meets metal with so much reverb on the vocals that it sounds like it’s coming from a dungeon. Very cool stuff!
Together, Lee and Chip make up Providence, RI metal outfit, The Body. Their state may be small but the sound is huge! From towering Sunn stacks they issue forth sludgy doom metal that coats your body in a viscous syrup of evil that will never wash out. But The Body did not play this night.
Instead, Lee and Chip’s side projects each played a set replete with the same ridiculous amount of wattage and decibels. The first of them, Siege Engine, is Chip’s solo project of dark, droning guitar. It comes across almost unbearably slow, like a cruel form of torture that you can’t seem to get enough of. It filled the small bar with an ambiance of impending doom with each sorrowful dirge-like strum of the guitar. The occasional agony-filled screams begged for release from some terrifying affliction. It’s the kind of thing you really have to immerse yourself in to appreciate. You either feel it or it bores you to tears, there really are no other ways around it.
Dead Times is something entirely different. Although just as slow and dark, DT is a guitar and Lee on an array of noise generators and manipulators. While the guitarist strums and screams wicked Black Metal, Lee mixes in electronic noise, distorted beats and strangely appropriate samples. It was some of the most unique experimental metal imaginable and the performance was it’s own form of art. At one point, they had lights in the back set up to dim along with a devastating, looped, female voice sample like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was experimental at its core and touched upon the industrial like metal from the future.
And what a bleak and frightening future it is!
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