Popular opinion in the underground metal scene states that a band based on aggression, speed and enthusiasm will peak in their first handful of albums. With all members in their forties, Napalm Death say bullish!t to that theory every night they board a stage.
Whilst Napalm Death have honed their technical abilities and musical craftsmanship since unleashing the crusty beast Scum on the world in 1987, energy is still the key to a Napalm set. Vocalist Barney Greenway is unable to control his body spasms as his infamous roar is launched into the Glasgow night.
In his softest Birmingham accent, Barney announced tonight’s set as a “special f_cking Chrsitmas f_cking box”. And while a local punter did request jingle bells, instead we received a best of Napalm’s laster quarter decade… from the crusty, almost sludgey, riffing of Scum to the debut of a new song Quarantined off Utilitarian to be released in February.
Adding to the usual Dead Kennedy’s cover, Napalm also indulged in covers of Cryptic Slaughter and especially enjoyable punky cover of a Siege track.
For a band based in aggression and rage at the system, Napalm Death is a band that leaves you feeling positive about the next day. Underneath the Mitch Harris shrieks and Barney baritone blasts lays a family friendly chorus that could fit into any pop song “When all is said and done/heaven lies in my heart/This life is a gift/To be lived and loved“. Sure it forms part of When All is Said and Done’s anti-religion rant, but its a nice ethos just the same.
As always rants form a part of a Napalm set. While I don’t appreciate being preached out, its hard to not get onboard with Napalm’s themes – torture by anyone is wrong, organised religion is bullish!t and nazi punks, well they might as well go ahead and fuck off.
As Suffer the Children signalled a close to the night, stage divers rained from the Ivory Blacks stage. Some big units bombed into the crowd with little regard for their’s or others’ bodies. One particularly disastrous effort even brought a laugh for the overworked bouncer solely manning front of stage.
Smiles is all I saw as we entered the cold Glasgow night.
Posted in Admin on December 17, 2011 by Noise Road
Now the nausea’s in my guts
and I’m wrestling with doubt
the kind you get
when your heroes sell you out
- Pig Destroyer, Alexandria
The whiskey-soaked larynx of Down’s NOLA album is my favourite vocal performance. In the years following, vocalist Phil Anselmo’s slurred rants rewrote history, betrayed friends and promoted white pride.
Layne Staley’s melancholic lines are etched into my soul… But should you stain your consciousness with the wisdom of such a man? Should you put weight into the words of one who so isolated himself that his body rotted for two weeks before it was discovered?
Max Cavalera’s blunt attack on Sepultura’s Arise announced my metal awakening. Cavalera overcame third world poverty to record albums that still stand tall today. Less than a decade later, Cavalera stood at the forefront of Nu-Metal. His first post-Sepultura single features Fred Durst.
My metal heroes failed to practice the wisdom that they preached. They failed to live up to the values that they sold me. They betrayed my loyalty for Fred Durst. My metal heroes are unreliable.
No more heroes
no more, no more
In my world of enemies
I walk alone
- Converge, No Heroes
Many say that they do not have heroes. They do not need heroes. Heroes are for children or for the weak. They are crutch for those seeking to fill the void of their nothing lives… a crutch like religion or drugs or a football team or Oprah.
I don’t need no arms around me
and I don’t need no drugs to calm me
- Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall pt III
I need heroes. I need something to inspire and to guide me out of the muck. Sometimes it is a paragraph from a book or a lyric from a song… but sometimes it is more than the works of a man. Sometimes it is the man.
My life has been full of compromise. I get stuck in ruts and I allow things to slowly get worse. In contrast my heroes never compromised. My heroes were never reasonable.
Hunter S Thompson never compromised. Hemingway and Orwell never compromised. Thompson rode with the Hells Angels. Hemingway and Orwell joined the Spanish Civil War. The man behind the words increases the power of the words. However, Thompson and Hemingway’s treatment of their families was poor. Both painted the walls with their brains. What kind of heroes are those?
My fictional heroes are no better. I recall sitting in Perth airport returning from an unsuccessful job interview. I was overweight, suffering from chronic headaches and unexplained blood noses. In the departure lounge, blood poured from my nose onto a paperback copy of Fight Club. Fight Club’s narrator demanded extreme action. I required extreme change.
I believe that is the root of my interest in the men behind metal. They are never reasonable. Some of our metal heroes are so far up that river that their moral compass is as skewed as Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now’s Kurtz.
Phil Anselmo has been a staple of my life since my great mate, Osaka Bonez, started driving us to under-age, binge-drinking parties. Phil’s roar sounded from his Mum’s Toyota mini-van throughout the sketchy northern suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia.
Those years saw Anselmo at his musical peak. Anselmo’s voice on NOLA has a whiskey-soaked quality between a melody and an all out Pantera assault. Lyrics from NOLA still resonate into my thirties.
Months away from overdosing in a stadium parking lot, Anselmo tracked Trendkill’s vocals alone in New Orleans after refusing to record alongside the band in Texas. It does not sound like a recipe for success. However, Anselmo’s lyrics contain a rare honesty. Junk would ultimately warp that honesty, as well as his sense of reality and history.
Buy it from a store
from MTV to on the floor
you look just like a star
its proof you don’t know who you are
If I hit bottom and everything’s gone
the Great Mississippi please drown me and run
- Pantera, The Great Southern Trendkill
Even at his lowest, Anselmo oozed charisma. However Anselmo is the prime example of an unreliable hero. For all his triumphs with Pantera and Down, there have been terrible musical lows. Some lyrics are cringeworthy. Anselmo has been prolific, but prolifically inconsistent in quality… and then there is the man.
If I had known Anselmo personally over the last two decades, I would not have liked the man. My experience is that junkies do not make good friends. Worse than any drug-related failures was the pseudo-white-pride rhetoric. I ain’t got room in my life for that shit, Phil.
As a young adult I would defend my heroes even when their actions seemed indefensible. This was not a matter of separating the man from the music. I had invested my inspiration in the man.
As greys appeared in my beard, I realised that my heroes had not failed me. My heroes did not owe me a thing.
My heroes were heroes because they represented an extreme change that I was incapable of. This extremity produced extreme music and extreme living. Extreme living often lead to extreme drinking, extreme drug-taking and extremely questionable words and actions. Their failures are a direct result of their lack of compromise that inspired me.
So, what is a hero? A hero is someone who can inspire you – whether it be from a decade of achievement or just a single lyric or riff. I do not need a role model. I’m 31 years old. I do not want to be my heroes.
Despite their musical inconsistencies, despite their personal failings, despite the reality TV shows, I could not do without my metal heroes. My trust remains in whiskey and weed and Black Sabbath.
Your trust is in whiskey and weed and Black Sabbath
With an apartment less than five minutes from tonight’s venue, I have no excuse for missing the entirety of Darkest Hour and Devildriver’s sets. No excuse except for being stranded on a bicycle near Glasgow airport after winter’s first snowstorm. A couple of months ago, I hadn’t ridden a bike in nigh on two decades. Hailing from the driest state in the driest continent, today marked the first day that I have ever ridden through snow. At times I was snow-blind (and not in a Black Sabbath-less-than-subtle-cocaine-reference kind of way). After finally making it to work covered in a blanket of ice, I didn’t know if I could brave another roll on the Glaswegian roads.
The snow and the 170mph winds that followed created a spectacular break in a mild but gloomy Autumn. How does Glasgow deal with the gloom? Glasgow drinks.
A week previous, I was at the work Xmas show in one of the city’s fancier hotels. We were quarantined from 3pm until 10pm while we drank, ate turkey and drank some more… At 10pm we were unleashed on the rest of unsuspecting punters in the hotel… It wasn’t long before bouncers were rounding us up one by one and evicting apprentice and company director alike, like the mute humans in Planet of the Apes. We weren’t mute but we weren’t talking much sense. That’s a Glasgow work show.
It may be a Monday night, but the locals are hard at it. Machine Head mailman, Robb Flynn, thanks the crowd for their own beery songs of praise between Machine Head tracks. Flynn then attempts to transition into the acoustic intro of Darkness Within with a heartfelt speech about the personal importance of music, Sabbath and, well, weed… but the drunk chants continued. Earlier, Flynn hit the right note with the punters with his patented drink-lobbing into the crowd. No one is able to pitch a plastic cup across a room like Flynn. I am alway surprised how often the drinks are caught and drunk.
Monday night beers are my second favourite kind of beer. Monday morning beers being my favourite. Unfortunately with the late arrival, I could only squeeze in two of the exhibition centre’s unnamed lager. You know its good a beer when they aren’t even willing to tell you what it is. It was probably Tennents, but lets be honest – Tennents, Carling, Carlsberg, Fosters – they all pretty much taste the same.
Nondescript beer in hand, I walked into the breakdowning Bring Me the Horizon. They aren’t my cup of tea, but at least each song sounds distinct from each other. There was even a bit of ambient guitar texture on one track before the inevitable breakdown. Still I got no problem with the kids digging on this. Today they’re bringing you the horizon, maybe in a few years they’ll be Pig Destroying.
As I look around the venue, my first arena show since… probably another Machine Head show back in Australia in 2009… I notice a lot of young attendees – real young, like 15 years young. I don’t see these kids so much at bar shows. Every now and then I wish I could be a kid again, but then I see these poor b@st@rds. Most of them look as awkward as I did at 15. No hair on my face, unsure…. At 19, the face was harrier but I wasn’t any less awkward.
I remember being 19 and wanting to belong at shows for Sepultura and Faith No More and Machine Head. I’d be there with the Machine F_cking Head chant, sweaty in the mosh. Only a few years ago I sought community at the Patton/Melvins curated ATP festival in the UK. However community has been a rare thing for me at shows. Roadburn was great this year, talking to stoners in line for the shower block about the awesomeness of the Year of No Light set. Singing arm in arm with strangers at the Southampton Dillinger show restored my faith in southern England. However, these moments of community have been the exception.
Glasgow itself is an odd town for community. Glaswegians are happy to drink with a stranger in a bar. Scottish people are either unusually friendly or batsh!t crazy. Seriously Glasgow has got to have the highest density of genuinely crazy people. For all the shared beers and laughs, Glasgow is not the easiest place to make genuine friends of any substantial depth. When I think of my days lost to a sh!tty job in Southampton, I also think of the great friends that I made down there. You never make friends like the friends that you make in the trenches of a lost-cause war.
Here in Glasgow, I found a vibrant city of bars and an endless stream of gigs. My job is decent – they even send me to Sweden every few months. However, I found it harder to make anything more than superficial friendships for months. Maybe in those initial months I may have sought community again, but walking into my first arena show in years I was not looking for friends. To some degree, I was only looking to tolerate the crowd. Once you group together more than a few hundred people, you can usually count on a significant percentage being d!cks.
Most of the shows of the last few years of Noise Road have been found in tiny rooms across the UK and Europe. Even though I love Machine Head, I was unsure what a big metal show was in 2011. Despite my reservations, Machine Head showed what big metal should be.
I only bought Machine Head’s latest, Unto the Locust, a few days prior. The initial thought was that it didn’t quite match the previous Machine Head epic, the Blackening… but man did those tracks come alive in Glasgow tonight. I went home to Unto the Locust with fresh ears. Its the album of a hardened live outfit.
Launching into opening two tracks of the album, I am Hell and Be Still and Know, the band played almost the entirety of the album. The Locust, This is the End and Who We Are showed that Machine Head bring you an entire metal concert within each song – fist pumping, sing along choruses, wailing leads and chugging low ends all in the space of a single track.
Through the Ashes of Empires’ Imperium is everything that is good about being in a big room of people who enjoy genuinely great music. That’s a rare joy my friends. We pumped fist together. We sang together and we shouted the anthem “Here me now/words I vow/No f_cking regrets/Fuck these chains/No g0d d@mn slave/I will be different/I stand here defiantly/my middle finger raised/f_ck your prejudice“… Written on a page, these lyrics may seem a little ham-fisted, but in a room filled with chuggy guitars and bodies echoing Flynn’s protest, it is beyond cathartic…. The floor spread as a massive pit formed. With all the alcohol on the floor those running struggled to keep their feet.
Beautiful Mourning and Aesthetics of Hate represented 2007′s classic the Blackening. The latter throwing the crowd into a frantic sprint, only pausing occasionally to yell along with Flynn or to fly the horns for Flynn and Demmel’s duelling guitars.
The Blood, the Sweat, the Tears showcases the fan-dividing era. 1999′s The Burning Red started Machine Head’s dalliance with Nu Metal, which lead to the career low of Supercharger. But I stand by the Burning Red. If you are feeling all emo one day, best apply Burning Red for violent empowerment “I built these walls around me/and I can break them all away“. Flynn’s difficult childhood gives him more excuse for emo moments than most of us. This vulnerability is part of Machine Head’s unique mix. Machine Head’s thick chugging, death roars and melodic passages are weaved together in an early Metallica-like proggy thrash.
Old and Ten Ton Hammer show that these elements of Machine Head blueprint were always there, but perhaps in a rawer, heavier form.
Davidian, with the greatest breakdown in music, was always going to close the night. However I think that the other certainty in the encore, Halo from an album 15 years later, shows the magnitude of what Machine Head have achieved. For a band based in aggression, they released their rawest and heaviest work early in the form of Davidian on their first record. 15 years later they were able to produce their best album, refining that rage and honing the other elements that featured throughout their career.
The night ended with Flynn channeling a version of Bruce Dickinson’s “Scream for me…”
Do you feel free, Glasgow?
Glasgow… Do you feel FREEEEE!!!!
LET FREEDOM-RING WITH-A SHOT! GUN! BLAST!
Great music can be popular. A big room can be a great night. Why can’t more big bands be as awesome as Machine Head?
After a full Glaswegian day immersed in a thick fog, the sun set at 16:23… and it is only the start of November.
The days are shorter in northern Scandinavia, but there is a beauty in their winter. Bright sunny days with crisp, dry air break the brutal cold in smaller, less dense towns. You are never too far from bays covered in thick snow or frozen forests.
In contrast, the UK winter is grey and damp. The air is never dry. As the kids in Govan throw rocks at the bus on your dark commute to and from work, forests and lakes seem a long way away.
Last winter I found myself in Southampton, UK, with a bank balance of zero and a sh!t job. You’ll never get out of this town. You’ll never get out.
The snow and cold remained a novelty for this kid from a desert continent, but the short days bummed me out. You stomped to work in the dark and you stomped home in the dark.
Southampton is much smaller than Birmingham, Glasgow and even Leeds, but it is as grey as any of those towns. WWII left many UK towns flattened. In the post-war scramble to house the displaced population, a grey, bland skyline arose. In winter that grey skyline of the industrial port town blends into the grey of the daylight hours. The sun is rarely sighted and a wet chill hangs in the air.
The grimness of a Southampton winter is what it took to understand Godflesh. For years I just did not get Godflesh or Jesu or any of Justin Broadrick’s projects. In 2009, I even caught Jesu at the Primavera festival in Barcelona… But Broadrick is not the music of Barcelona. Broadrick is not the music of sangria on a 30-degree-celsius day with the beautiful people on a Mediterranean beach. Justin Broadrick is the music of cold, wet, grey winters in the dense, urban industrial centre of Birmingham. It is the sound of Southampton in winter when you have a sh!t job and no way out.
I caught the trouble-plagued Godflesh reunion set at Hellfest last year, and then the awesome performance of Streetcleaner at Roadburn this year. The set at Damnation Festival in Leeds was incident-free but its almost like Broadrick is uncomfortable when there is not a wonky wheel. It seems that he has to recreate the tension of the song on stage. Towels were required under the excessive lighting. Awkwardness and tension are what make Godflesh. Benny holds down that machine beat on stage-left, while Broadrick wrenches out pain from his guitar and from the throat.
When you are too poor to leave your industrial town, there seems no way out. No relief from the soul wrench of the mechanical city…. but the truth is… Southampton is half an hour from the New Forest. Glasgow is half an hour from Loch Lomond, and a little further on is the incomparable Scottish highlands. Leeds is on the footstep of the Yorkshire Dales. It is eternally dark and damp in the UK winter, but you need to remember that beauty is never that far away.
I’m not sure if beauty is the right word to describe Ireland’s Altar of Plagues. They are far more organic than Godflesh, even if they also deal in dark energies.
The Irish are amongst the friendliest people on earth. Within minutes of arriving in Ireland on both my trips there I had new friends. As a sole traveller you can feel isolated from conversations of any depth. This is never the case in Ireland. Walk into any Irish pub and you’ll never be short of conversation.
However there is a sadness to the Irish people below their immediate friendliness. The Irish history is one of trading invading masters. The population of Ireland today is still less than before the 1840s famine, where death and emigration destroyed the country. Fresh economic woes have hit the country in the last couple of years.
I do not think that every Irish band is weighed down by the moroseness of their history. I do not know if the less claustrophobic, but equal dampness of Ireland is significant in their sound. However I think that it is a factor.
In any case nature and moroseness is a strong theme musically and lyrically in Altar of Plagues. The previous album, White Tomb, speaks of man’s civilisation falling into nature’s grasp.
We built our towers in the sand
And now they collapse around us…
…for your children have no place to grow their bones
- Through the Collapse: Watchers Restrained
The latest, Mammal, talks of death as an artificial creation of man:
Birds know nothing of this
it is our vanity
we create death
we create this entity
- Neptune is Dead
Altar of Plagues played the smallest stage of the festival. Nursing a pint of carlsberg, at the back of that stage for Talons’ preceding set, I could barely distinguish the two violins from the rest of the band. I needed to head straight down to the floor for Altar of Plagues. The odd shaped room, with punters packed in to get a decent sound, added to the sweaty atmosphere.
With many bands that aim to create a mood, technical difficulties can take the crowd out of the atmosphere. As guitarist, James Kelly, tried to isolate his equipment issues, the rest of the band looped through a quiet section of a song for several minutes. However it did not taint the set. Altar of Plagues are not creating another world. They are dudes in jeans and Deathspell Omega t-shirts. Their performance in based in the real world. Technical difficulties occur in the real world.
Altar of Plagues energy is dark and weighty in depth. But its dark energy is a sadness rather than the usual black metal evil. There can be no doubt that the band are putting all their energies in, as members yell at the mic from metres away.
Something of this weight without pretension is a rare find. Go see Altar of Plagues.
Earlier in the day, I found myself lost amongst the hospital buildings and the various Leeds University faculties. Inside the student union, Shining started their set. Every time I have previously caught Shining they have been billed as Shining (Nor). So I made the rookie mistake of looking for the nihilistic black n roll of Sweden’s Shining, only to walk into the spazzy metal of the Norwegian band of the same name.
As I waited for the slowest, worst poured beer of my life (seriously how does a man reach his twenties without being able to pour a beer?), the buzz of Madness and the Damage Done filled the Jagermeister stage.
I was back the Jagermeister stage for Dragged into Sunlight. Dragged into Sunlight’s sound was thick of sludgy riffs and the evil aesthetic of black metal. However the presentation of the set distracted me. The band spent the entirety of the set, save the last half minute, with their backs to the crowd. I do not know what the intention is, but it comes off as if the band are in a rehearsal space. The band obviously do care about image with candles as props and the stage bathed in red. Each to their own I guess, but I think Dragged into Sunlight’s worthy music might be served better by turning around a little earlier.
After a 5-hour train down from Glasgow and a beery day of bands, Ulver’s wall of keyboards and computers did not grab me. It was time to get in a couple of hours kip before the train back up through the Yorkshire Dales.
At £29 for bands of the quality of Godflesh and Altar Plagues, Damnation Festival is surely a cure for the winter greyness. The stone walls separating the autumnal hills of the Yorkshire Dales remind me that I have to escape the urban grimness on weekends. As I emerged from the mysterious fog that seems to hover on the English side of the border, the winter ahead looked a little less grey.
Vocalist Puciato parted the Garage’s violent Red Sea, before hurling his body into the void. Like Moses placing God’s chosen people on the seabed, the Dillinger vocalist sets up the mic stand for your favourite part of any Dillinger show. Puciato disappears as the dam bursts back on him. 2,000 punters scream “Destroyer!… There’ll be another just like you!”
In the last 18 months Noise Road has caught the Dillinger experience in Belgium (read here), France (read here), Leeds (read here) and Southampton/London (read here).
So now that we are catching a DEP show in our new Weegie base, what original thoughts can we possibly have left in the tank? Did we ever have any original thoughts?…
Halfway into the set my head hit the floor of the Garage. It hit hard. My head tried to assess the situation, while a member of the band passed above.
As the kids hauled me back to my feet, I considered that I might be getting a little too old for the pit. Dillinger is the only show where I join the mosh. As such it has been about half a decade since I’d found myself in a daze on the floor of a show. Thankfully the kids looked after me. The kids are alright.
When the first notes of Farewell Mona Lisa hit to start the night, I had half a beer still in hand. In my binge drinking prime, I would have necked it and joined the pit. However as my stay in Scotland grows I have traded in binge beer-drinking for slow-burn whisky-alcoholism. As a result, I wore the half a glass of beer as the show began.
The kronenbourg in my shirt soon disappeared in my sweat and the sweat of my friends in the pit. My soaked jeans stuck to me as I walked from the show. If I was ever going to get away with p!ssing myself in public, tonight would have been the night.
A Dillinger pit is a mix of violent catharsis and good energies. There is a sense of community with the band as guitarists, Weinman and Tuttle, and Puciato frequently launch into the crowd. Weinman accuses a punter of fisting him mid-solo as he returns to the stage. We try to avoid Tuttle’s erratic assaults and we yell into Puciato’s mic whenever we can.
But this isn’t just some sloppy sideshow. The intricate music is tight despite the excursions into the crowd.
The community isn’t just with the band but with the other punter in the room. Sometimes this good-will-to-all-men vibe goes a little too far. At the merch desk, a kid kissed me on my forehead to demonstrate what he had done to Puciato in the pit. I’m not that comfortable with my sexuality that I want strange, sweaty men kissing me on the head. In fact, in general, I don’t like strangers touching me at all. Everyone has little personality defects – that’s one of mine. If I don’t know you, and you’re not Natalie Portman, I don’t want you hugging or kissing me.
More so than previous Dillinger shows, tonight has a party atmosphere. For the first song of the encore, the chief musical force, Weinman, switches his guitar for Rymer’s kit. A buzzy cover of Nirvana’s Territorial P!ssings followed. Smiles abound on stage. Weinman in particular seemed in good spirits. He spent much time in the crowd and he seemed more at ease bantering with the punters.
In previous reviews we have praised Dillinger’s mix of intricacy and energy. Tonight was more of a good time feel. They missed more notes as they threw themselves into the crowd, but it made for a better experience.
Good Neighbor (I have to admit it hurts to spell Neighbour in the American way) closed a joyous, sweaty night. Dillinger seem to be in high spirits, enjoying playing together. I would not be surprised if their next long player had more than a tinge of a big fun rock record.
