All photos and text by Charles Nickles
Morbid Sphere
This was Morbid Sphere’s first gig (or so some drunk slurred wantonly at a pretty, disinterested party) and it was impressive as shit (wrought and taut and relentless), considering, though perhaps not entirely surprising as this band features cats from Anicon, Sanguine Eagle, Yellow Eyes, etc.
Still pedigree does not ferocity make. That takes practice and patience and a singular appetite for the yawning abyss and I don’t know enough about the men that make the band to say for certain how much collective effort they put into MS in between their multitude of other obligations but it is evident that these motherfuckers are collectively committed to some savage and apocalyptic bliss.
Mick Barr
You ever listen to “Flight of the Bumblebee” and think, “Damn, I wish Wyld Stallyns was real” because you know they’d cover the shit out of that Swan Bird magic on a pair of Flying Vs and maybe, just maybe bring peace to the universe as the late, great George Carlin so foretold only instead of just playing transfigurative interlude to a forgotten Saltanic opera, the piece was chopped, screwed and jacked to thirty-three elliptical minutes and instead of being faithfully played by those beloved San Dimas dunderheads it served as the virtuoso axis for some totally avant luminary dude named Mick (with the jelly wrists) to spin into an exhaustively bitchin’ whirlwind?
I mean, of course you did…
Yellow Eyes
Some part of me has always wanted to be an arborist or an arborealist or an arbortect or whatever the fuck name you call the men, women, etc. who make their life’s work a quiet war against and in praise of nature, refining and defining fauna to applaud their artistic whims.
It just seems so savagely Zen.
So decadent.
So FRENCH.
And lord knows my mind goes cuckoo with Francophilia under certain states of duress.
And I have been duressed, my friends, but I suppose that’s just life in the big dumb city that gave rise to Yellow Eyes and all their grey sun glory and to be honest I don’t know if I’ve ever always wanted anything but there is something about the concrete transcendentalism of Yellow Eyes that tickles a very distinct itch in me; agitating my urban unrest with wild-eyed dreams of roots and spires.
It’s inexplicable, even for black metal’s notoriously inky obfuscations and perhaps it’s that wantonly ethereal otherness exploited in such intimate surroundings that makes their performance so inspiring.
Or perhaps it’s a simple matter of their sound being so much more than what is offered by the many mint-masked shadow merchants lazily perpetuating the fantasies of contempt.
A tender tumult that is equal parts ferocious and lugubrious, hopeful and damned as the man who first fired the forge.
