Text and Photos: Charles Nickles
Sometimes Sundays start with the best of intentions (or, at least, the most sensible given your track record) and sometimes those same Sundays end at 2am in the basement of a metal bar, drinking beer with a Swedish death metal band trying to gracefully disengage from a soul-sucking conversation with some dude whose got a hardon for Trump and a serious issue with the normalization of “trans” anything…
“I’ve got nothing against them. Its just that they aren’t natural.”
…gender equality…
“It’s chromosomes, man. XX is not the same as XY.”
…and being ignored by the band, girls and his friend (whose face twisted in shame every time he opined)…
“How come no one has the balls to talk politics? The people have spoken! Why won’t you talk to me about President Trump?”
“Because we’ve both had plenty to drink and we clearly have radically different opinions which neither of us is about to cede. Besides, it’s really fucking late and I need to get home so I can get up for work in the morning.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well thank you for talking to me.”
“No problem.”
Turbid North
I remember this one time, that kid Anthony took me to see his Grandmother’s tenants’ band play North Six. It was Anodyne. They were clean cut and brutally humorless. Terrifying in a way that crossed Anabolic excess with biker meth in a Bateman ritual of straight white male apoplexy. I only listened to them on comps for a good decade after that. Turbid North evoked some of that same tremble in me but I feel less like they’ve watched kittens die and more like they can swing life on the killing floor.
Full of Hell
I laughed when FoH started playing. I couldn’t help it. It was just so fucking SO, you know? So loud. So brutal. So noisome. So frantic. So incalculably unpleasant it’s really no surprise the kid I met who was so frothingly stoked to experience their set smelled like ammonia. I dug them, though, and would totally drag a friend to see them play just to irrevocably fuck up their day.
Entombed A.D.
It took me a long time to realize just how fucking perfect Entombed were. In fact, it wasn’t until last year that the true wonder of their bestiary sunk its teeth into me and, of course, by then they were dead. So now there’s Entombed A.D., and fuckin’ A am I set in because, honestly, though the riffs and roars of Left Hand Path and Wolverine Blues are true blue dick-kickers, it was Lars Petrov’s mammoth rock and roll growl that made that band perfect and he’s what propels Entombed A.D.
I think?
Honestly, I don’t know who all does what to make the band the monster it is but it’s evident they all work together in exaltation of that madman’s haul – or maybe they don’t. Who knows? Who cares? Entombed A.D. fucking shred and slay and party just like you’d hope they would. Horns up, beats down, hellhounded.
