Photos and Text by Charles Nickles aka Kid Swinging
God Mother
I knock a lot of hardcore because I think a lot of hardcore is dumb which, I’m sure, won’t make me many friends but out here in my smoky little squirrel cage I don’t need no goddamn friends to know how to RAWK!
I certainly don’t need no crew.
And yeah, yeah, yeah I know the genre is as elliptical as shit and for every limp-dicked, crowd-killing piece that makes his meat with the thug-a-lug-chud call and response “UNITY! REALITY! STREETS!” white-bred juiceneck Death Wish ennui there is an artist, a weirdo, a kid self-medicating with sonic violence and despite the relentless flailing of a few WAY TOO EARLY, DUDE wastoids, God Mother definitely forges their home amongst the latter batch of grinning miscreants and – in so doing – manages to turn the dark and stormy hollows of St. Vitus into a…fuckin…party?
Yeah, man.
Total party.
Squawling and screaming and banging, of course, but there was an honest-to-fuck limbo contest in the middle of a chugger and I’m pretty sure that singer (Sebastian?) has a fuckin’ diamond in his cheek which is just THE most delightful thing and while he jumped and surfed and climbed and flailed and danced, hand-in-hand, with strangers and surrendered his mic to many an electrified head in the pit, the band rocked a steady stoic, of sorts, which was critical in keeping the inspirational chaos from devolving into a seasick maelstrom and even when the fists were flying the faces behind them were smiling wide and free from teen to fortysomething and that’s just not the kind of thing you see at heavy everyday.
Primitive Weapons
I have no idea what Primitive Weapons sound like. I’ve seen them before and heard them more than a few times but – for the life of me – I can’t put my finger on their sonic signature. It’s like they sound like everything and nothing at once and my brain just prefers to register absence. They’re metal, they’re hardcore, post-something-or-other, stadium rock and roll over. I have the same problem listening to them as I do the recent outings of Cloud Nothings (though, other than guitar, bass and drums, the bands are almost entirely dissimilar) where a whole song or record just seems to scream by in a blackout and nothing registers except the inexorable fact that time passes steadfast in a great, grim march towards the infernal sea and the disconnect between me and the music is so great I have to actively remind myself that, in the ensuing silence that follows, I have, in a fact, marched a few (or many, depending) minutes closer to death.
It’s weird, man.
It’s also kinda fascinating.
And I could (and probably should) do a deeper delve into whatever tonal erasure I experience when certain music plays but today’s been a bit of a boner and it’s twenty hours later and I still can’t shake this hangover so fuck that exploratory noise.
Just please be advised that Primitive Weapons totally slays live which is a bit unexpected because I don’t feel like I see their names on near enough marquees but Dave is busy with Vitus and the rest of his crew are busy being their own men and it must be a real motherfucker to be a big show band in a tiny ass van schlepping your gear across the country.
But they could be!
Just because I can’t hear a goddamn thing doesn’t mean the many leatherbacks in attendance (and many, many more who were too slow on this sold out score) can’t get wild with the riffage like it was friggin’ Maiden circa Killers up there and if more folks just got over their regular intake of myopic cultural advisory panels more bands like Primitive Weapons would be able to live handsomely on the strength of their powerage party and they could just play endlessly and we could all keep raging until our hips displaced.
Cult Leader
Fuuuuuuuuck, man. Shit. Fuck. Okay. Cult Leader. Right.
I got this.
Okay, so you know how your friends or family make that sound when you tell them you listen to heavy metal? That cookie monster GRRRRRUUUUUUUOOOOWWWWLL accompanied by Wyld Stallyns air guitar and maybe some air drums or whatever and you know they’re doing that to make fun of you for being boorish enough to appreciate a classification of music still carrying the foul albatross those ’85 Sparks dipshits left half dead around every good hesher’s neck and though, you KNOW, the music you love and exhort is so much more elastic than their pretty much anything that doesn’t include the word “fusion” (end even then) and, besides, the genre is actually incredibly inclusive and inventive and influential (I’m looking at you, John Zorn) and even the fucking Atlantic has ceded space to the form but then you pause for a moment debating whether it’s better to foment a forum or flip your “loved” ones the bird and, in your pause, you understand exactly where they’re coming from.
And it makes you laugh.
Because there is a lot in metal that DOES sound like a sentient garbage disposal clamoring for meaning in this sick, sad world and maybe, just maybe, some of that sound could be coming from Salt Lake’s pre-eminent blackened crust progressives. Cult Leader and – though defensive, at first – you can readily concede that, to the casual observer, such a sonic onslaught might resonate as nothing more than an ugly absurdity because it IS an ugly absurdity but absurdity, like dada or decadence, is a literate and reactionary tradition which is obtuse and immediate and topical as shit but whereas the armchair intellectual tradition would prefer its violent deconstructions of social mores in dead letters written with respect to passive observation you choose (now, at least) to appreciate your upended normatives played in a foul silhouette that bucks and writhes like a killer defiling his peace, dripping sweat and spit into your short, crooked face.
(which you lap up in strange luxury)
You prefer the wall of sound that weighs your lungs down. The kick and the prick, the hiss and the wail. The madness of the willfully incoherent shoved down your throat at volume as the welcome crush of unfamiliar skin threatens, as ever, to do you in.
(but you can never die, can you?)
You’d like to say it’s like a play but it’s more like a pantomime riot, raised high on tangled wires and all the children are on fire while the city sleeps soundly, content in their place in the food chain but that won’t play in Peoria so, instead you’d explain that it’s all theater of the living will: a triumph of and challenge to the senses that excites and confounds you with a sound that is both wholly familiar and furiously obtuse and you think, nah man. Fuck you. You’re gonna tell me you just threw on ‘A Love Supreme’ when it was released and that shit just MADE sense to you because it didn’t and you know it didn’t and it probably still doesn’t because the goddamn record’s been collecting dust since I was born and no, I’m not comparing Cult Leader’s sound/style/place in the cultural pantheon to one of the most profound pieces of 20th century American art (of any discipline) but what I AM saying is that, JUST like a motherfucker needs to learn to bend their ear for YEARS to find the true wonder of a Coltrane solo so too do motherfuckers need to learn a new set of aesthetics to appreciate what metal is and can do and MAYBE then you’ll get why so many people are here tonight, screaming together in the darkness. Maybe THEN you’ll get why the twists and travails of ‘A Patient Man’ read like a fucking magnum opus and then maybe, just maybe you’d FINALLY get why I can’t just go and listen to “nice” music with the V/C/V and the major chords structures and the whatever the fuck all it is you think would make me happy.
BECAUSE I AM HAPPY, GODDAMNIT!
I’m more than happy, actually.
I’m destroyed.
