Noise Road

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?