Maryland Deathfest VIII Running Order Announced (sort of)

By far the biggest underground metal event every year in the area, and arguably the United States, is the Maryland Deathfest at Sonar in Baltimore. The Maryland Deathfest isn’t until Memorial Day weekend in May, but they start planning it usually around 10 or 11 months before then. Their website has listed most of the bands that will be playing in 2010 for a while now, but just today they announced the full scheduled line up of bands, and the running order. Well, sort of. They list which day each band will be playing on, but the set times are not listed yet. The website says the set times will be listed “no later than 1 month before MDF.” Individual day tickets are now on sale too, though I think I’m going for a 3 day pass (I’ll save a whopping $4, fuck yeah!). You can get them here. One nice thing is the ticket price listed is the actual price, no service fees ($40 for the shorter day Friday, $47 for either Saturday or Sunday or $130 for a 3 day pass). There are going to be multiple stages, and if they run things similarly to last year, the headliners won’t actually play last. Last year they had an outdoor stage on the street in front of the venue. That stage is where the headliners played, but their sets ended before midnight and the indoor main stage still had a few bands play after that. Since Maryland Deathfest VIII is still a while off you can bet some bands will cancel by then, or have visa troubles (like Marduk did last year) or maybe even break up before the show. It’s not set in stone and things can change by then. Hell, their website even has a post dated with tomorrow’s date that DRI has been added to the line up. A message from the future, creepy. Anyways, the bands are all listed below under the day they’ll be playing, and you can click any band’s name to go to their MySpace page and give them a listen if you want to check them out.

Friday 28 May 2010
Gorguts
Possessed
D.R.I. (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles)
Watain
Coffins
Nazxul
Trap Them
Gride
Birds Of Prey
Malignancy
Jesus Crost
Stormcrow
Tombs
Defeatest
Putrescence

Saturday 29 May 2010
Autopsy
Sodom
Repulsion
Asphyx
Blood Duster
Incantation
Wolfbrigade
Melechesh
Haemorrhage
Portal
Impaled
Sadistic Intent
The Chasm
Deceased
Verbal Abuse
Fang
Obliteration
Ingrowing
Total Fucking Destruction
Fuck The Facts
Sulaco
Jucifer
Howl
The Communion

Sunday 30 May 2010
Obituary
Entombed
Pentagram
Nirvana 2002
Eyehategod
Pestilence
Malevolent Creation
Necrophobic
Converge
Naglfar
From Ashes Rise
Sinister
Capitalist Casualties
Captain Cleanoff
Gorod
Rompeprop
Gridlink
Magrudergrind
Krallice
Circle Of Dead Children
Black Breath
Massgrave
16
Rottenness
Surroundings
Honkey Kong

Bands whose names are struck through have canceled and will NOT be playing Maryland Deathfest as previously reported. My most recent update of this page was on 27 April 2010.

The full schedule including set times has been released and can be seen on the Upcoming Concerts page.

December 14, 2009
Categories: Sonar, Washington DC / Maryland / Virginia Metal Scene . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: Leave a comment

Jaxx Redesigns Its Website

Northern Virginia’s best metal club, Jaxx, gave its website a long due update. The site is no longer tagged “DC’s Euro-Metal Home” and gone is all the neon green. The site seems to be much cleaner and better laid out, though it seems to have lost almost any sense of its distinction. The old site was really dated and ugly, but it at least looked like you imagined a Jaxx site would. That said, I can’t blame them for trying to update their image some, the website being a part of that. They painted over all the glam rock band names they used to have in the main room and I sure didn’t complain about that. With the recession really hitting the entertainment industry in general, combined with bands scrambling to figure out how monetize their music with CD sales plummeting, there just aren’t as many tours going around. So Jaxx has become more diverse to make up for it. I’ve seen reggae and j-pop and various other completely non-metal events on the calendar, and I think they want to adjust their image to something that isn’t tied directly to metal in order to reflect that. On one hand this seems reasonable, I just hope it doesn’t backfire and alienate the dedicated fan base that’s already there. I’d imagine it won’t too much, as long as Jaxx continues to get some of the best metal bands that come to the region. I wonder if they’ll bring back parts of the page like the Jay Page and the staff photos page, I thought they added a more human element to the site and to the club itself, so it doesn’t seem like some faceless corporate entity (which it’s not). There’s a bit of talk about it all on the Jaxx forum. The website admin has been checking the forums pretty regularly and he responds quickly and helpfully to suggestions, comments and questions on there, so let him know what you do and don’t like. If you’ve gotten this far and haven’t check out the new site yet, well, do it now: www.jaxxroxx.com.

December 4, 2009
Categories: Jaxx Nightclub . Tags: , , , , , . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: 2 Comments

Review of Marduk gig at Sonar

Monday the 23rd of November 2009 was a rather grim and rainy day, perfect for a black metal show. Luckily Swedish black metal band Marduk was playing at the Talking Head Club inside Sonar in Baltimore that night, the closest stop to Washington DC on their US Plague Tour. I had a couple friends flake out on me, but since Marduk failed to get into the US for Maryland Deathfest back in May, and I missed their Baltimore stop on their 3 show mini tour back in August, I was determined not to miss them for a third time this year. So I drove up to Baltimore in that dreary cold rain by myself blasting metal all the way. When I got there Nachtmystium was setting up. They’re ok, sort of a thrashy black metal band. Not my favorite but worth checking out while drinking a beer or two. The final song of their set was a cover of GG Allin‘s song I Kill Everything I Fuck, which I gotta say was pretty fucking cool. Wasn’t expecting that one, wish I’d had my camera ready, I’d like to have that one on video. They’re scheduled to play with Kreator and Voivod at Jaxx in early March, so maybe I’ll get my chance then.

When Nachtmystium’s set ended I moved up to the front of the stage as everyone was clearing out to go smoke, order more beer, piss, etc… Got right up there and was chatting a bit to the people around me during the final sound check. Glad I did cause 2 of the guys next to me were throwing mad elbows all during Marduk’s set and fucking people up from the pit, but I got in good with em before that so I didn’t have any probs. Kinda dick of them, but it did keep people from the pit from fucking up my camera. Plus that latino guy wearing eyeliner and a shirt with the sleeves cut off looked like he could use a few bruises. Marduk’s set was pretty good, they played a good assortment of songs from a variety of albums which was cool. I’m not a huge fan of when bands play most of their new album and a few classics live, I much prefer the career spanning classics with a couple songs from the new album thrown in approach. This show was a pretty good example of that. During their long set they played songs off just about every album except for, oh yeah, my fucking favorite Marduk album Heaven Shall Burn… When We Are Gathered. Seriously, the whole time I was driving up there I was thinkin to myself how it’ll be worth all the stress of dark, rainy interstate traffic just to hear Infernal Eternal or maybe even Glorification Of The Black God live (basically a cover of Modest Mussorgsky’s classical piece A Night On Bald Mountain as arranged by Leopold Stokowski for the Disney movie Fantasia). Well, that didn’t happen. They did play some classics like Wolves, Funeral Bitch, and Baptism By Fire, but still, Infernal Eternal fucking rules. What the hell? If you like black metal and you haven’t heard those 2 songs do yourself a favor and listen to them right now by clicking their names up there. Fucking brutal! Anyways, the show was still fun and if not for the events on my drive home I’d probably say it was totally worth the trip to Baltimore on a Monday night (even tho the show ended after midnight on a weekday and I had to drive home afterwards). About 5 minutes outside of Baltimore on 95 my car decided it was going to stop running. Seriously, of all the times? I’ve had very few problems with this car in the 3 years I’ve owned it, but dying in Maryland was not awesome. A $200 tow truck ride got me back home at about 5am, plenty of time to be fucking exhausted for work the next day. Still, the set was good, the show was fun and I think I got some good pics too. I thought it was odd the drummer, Lars Broddesson, didn’t use 2 kick drums but instead had 2 petals set up on a single bass drum. That’s pretty uncommon for metal bands. By the end of their set, which was about an hour and a half, their corpse paint was smeared and the audience was running out of energy. They did the typical walk off stage encore thing but came back really quick, like 1 minute later, to play the final song of the night, Panzer Division Marduk. You can watch that video below. Overall I’d recommend any fan of old school black metal to go see Marduk, it’s a brutal show definitely worth the money.

November 27, 2009
Categories: Black Metal, Concert Reviews, Sonar, Talking Head Club . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: Leave a comment

Review of Baroness gig at Rock And Roll Hotel

On Wednesday the 18th of November 2009 I got off my ass and headed up to the Rock And Roll Hotel in the Atlas Theatre district of North East Washington, DC to go see Baroness play. I’d been to the Rock & Roll Hotel before, but not to see a band play. The venue wasn’t great, not very wide but deep, which must have been a bitch for the people in the back trying to see. The stage lighting was pretty poor and they don’t allow flash photography and since I can’t afford a $3k camera my pics aren’t the greatest. They did allow you to shoot video, but again since the lighting was so bad it all came out pretty dark (though the audio isn’t too bad) which you can see for yourself at the bottom of this post. It was $4.50 for a Miller Lite bottle which I guess is pretty standard for DC. The bar was crammed on one of the side walls to the back of the room, and the merch stand was crammed into the other side in front of the mixing console. Apparently they don’t allow moshing of any kind because a couple songs in when some guy started pushing people a bit the security came right up and put an end to that. The shift actually helped me get a little closer to the stage. Even though I’m usually holding a camera up front, I really don’t mind moshing at concerts (hate crowd surfers tho). If you don’t want people moshing at your venue, maybe you shouldn’t book metal bands at let them play somewhere more fun instead. Anyways, on to the band’s performance…

This was the first show of the tour supporting Baroness’ new album, Blue Record. I’m not certain but I’m betting this was the first time those songs were being played live. On the stage they had a cool looking fabric backdrop of the cover art from the new album. Their show started off a bit disorganized, they had some intro song playing, then it stopped, then after several minutes of silence they walked onto the stage and started playing. I noticed the lead guitarist had changed from a St. Vitus shirt to a Dark Castle shirt in this time, for some reason. I really like the energy of a lot of their songs on their new album. I’ve listened to their first one, Red Album, a few times but it has never gripped me as much as these newer songs do. The one thing I don’t like about the new album is all the intros and instrumentals, there’s a lot of them. Unfortunately for me, they play them live too. I guess that’s cool for people who enjoy them, but it’s really just a pause in the energy to me and honestly I don’t find theirs particularly interesting. Their show was pretty loud for a club this size, which is never a bad thing to me. The kick drum was really pounding, though the microphones didn’t seem to work well for the live show. They seemed to be very tight uni-directional microphones, which means if you’re not directly in front of them, you might as well be in the next room. This made the vocals just disappear completely from the mix a few times when the band members were particularly excited on stage. This was especially a problem for the lead guitarist and bass player, who were helping with backing vocals from time to time, since their mics were not as loud in the mix to begin with. The show was pretty good for the most part, they played most of the songs I really wanted to hear. The stage was pretty cramped but they still did a few theatrics to make things interesting. I thought it was kinda cool when the drummer poured water on his cymbals before a big entrance in a song, spraying the water everywhere in a cool visual effect. At the end of the show they did the typical encore thing where they walked off stage and waited a couple minutes to come back and play their final song of the night. I don’t understand why every headliner band seems to feel the need to do this, regardless of genre. It’s not an encore if it’s scripted! Anyways, they did play for almost an hour and a half, which might be a bit long for them. I mean I do enjoy their music, but since they’ve only got 2 full length albums out, they started running out of material to play that’s of the same caliber. This made the show start to drag on a bit for me. I really think these guys are a great up and coming band and I think with some better exposure they would be playing much larger venues. On the other hand, watching concerts at the 9:30 Club has become quite a drag, so I hope they don’t get too big too quick! It was a really fun show and for $12 it was well worth attending.

One more thing, if you’re planning on buying the Blue Record on vinyl at the concert, try to do it early. They ran out of copies to sell at this show. They said they were getting more the next day, but who knows how long those will last. I spoke to the bass player, Summer Welch, after the show, and the band seemed to think the vinyl was available on their record label’s website, Relapse.com. I had checked earlier that day and knew it wasn’t, so that means this vinyl is going to sell more than they’re expecting since people can’t buy it anywhere. They were selling all vinyl for $20, all t-shirts for $15 and CDs for $12, cash only of course.

November 19, 2009
Categories: Concert Reviews, Rock And Roll Hotel, Sludge Metal . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: 1 Comment

Review of Sunn O))) gig at Sonar

On Wednesday the 23rd of September 2009 I got off of work and met up with a friend of mine to head up to Baltimore to catch Sunn O))) at Sonar. Sunn O)))They didn’t play the main stage, but the much smaller “club stage”, which was fine by me as it was much more up close and personal. Sunn O))) is a strange band, they rarely tour and when I heard they were coming to Baltimore, a city within driving distance, I had to get a ticket. People either love this band and think that what they are doing is really groundbreaking and genius, or they think it’s just boring ambient noise and a total waste of their time. I’m not a huge drone fan but these guys are one of the best at it, and when describing their music I often think of abstract art in music form. It’s hard to define “songs” of theirs, as it all sort of melts together and the songs don’t really have any structure, well not in the normal sense at least.

Sunn O))) At SonarBefore they even took the stage they ran a fog machine on high for about 20 minutes, with a low volume recording of some sort of chants. Then at about 10:30 pm Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley came out on stage in their monk/jedi robes and started playing what I think was the beginning to the song Aghartha. Usually I’m pretty good at knowing what songs are being played, but again, this band doesn’t make that easy. Then about 10 minutes later Attila Csihar came up on stage, wearing a similar robe. This is the same Attila of Mayhem fame, and I’d actually seen him play with them at this same venue back in May as part of Maryland Deathfest VII. His performance at this smaller show was pretty outstanding, though sometimes I got the feeling he was being a bit distracting from the music itself, it was a Sunn O))) show after all, not an Attila show. Overall it was a really excellent performance from him though and it really showcased his vocal talent quite well. I always liked him better in Mayhem than Maniac, but this Sunn O))) show really highlighted his vocal range, even if I don’t think he said one actual word the whole night.
 
The set seemed to be what I’d basically call “songs” from their latest album, Monoliths & Dimensions, but I could be mistaken I suppose. It was an unreal experience though, like no concert I’ve been to before. At times everything seemed to be in slow motion, the music, the band’s movements, almost as if time was stretching as you fell into the event horizon of a black hole. The fog and lighting added a sort of murky element, like trying to look at something through dirty water. It was a really overwhelming experience, and it was LOUD. I mean I just saw Motörhead a few weeks before and that was loud, but these guys really made you feel every slow plodding note vibrate through every bone in your body. Of course I was a lot closer to the stage for this show, right up front. Sunn O))) doesn’t have a drummer but they did have a guy doing some sort of programming in the back, and I know I saw a trombone poking out of the fog at some point. The bass was thick and heavy like the foggy air in the room throughout the performance, and the whole thing almost seemed like it was from outer space at times.

Attila Csihar Of Sunn O)))Attila added to the theatrics at about midway through the set when he put on some gloves that had laser pointers built into the fingers. The lasers really stood out in the fog and surprisingly the whole effect didn’t come off as a raver thing at all, maybe it was the oversized robe. At some point Attila wandered off the stage for a bit to put on his next costume, which I gotta say what a bit over the top. It was another robe, but this time it was covered in fragments of mirrors. Attila Csihar Of Sunn O)))It also had a head piece, something like a head band with big pointy mirror shards coming out of it, somewhat resembling the statue of liberty’s head piece. He kept the laser pointer gloves on with this and did some cool things with the lasers reflecting off the mirrors, especially off the ones on his head. It was certainly a bizarre costume, not sure I’d be caught dead in that, but then Attila has always had a thing for wearing costumes on stage. The two guitarists also had some interesting poses and lurched around on stage very slowly, giving the production a feeling of peeking in on a secret ritual of some Lovecraftian cult.

The music fit this all very well and with the slow build ups and pure raw sound had the audience hypnotized. The slow singular notes building up in intensity into something almost resembling a chord progression really worked well in this setting. There were no breaks between “songs”, it was just one big musical experience. In all the show ended around midnight to an ovation from a crowd that had just had their minds melted for about 90 minutes. As I walked to the car with my friend, we caught a glimpse of the Stratovarius show, which was on the main stage that night at the club, and I remember thinking how I’m so glad I got to see Sunn O))) instead of being into that power metal crap! Damn, they had the bigger audience but those people really had no idea what they just missed only a few feet away. I’ve always been a fan of some of the more strange, bizarre and out there metal bands, of which Sunn O))) definitely fits the category of, so maybe my views on the whole thing are a bit biased, but still I highly recommend checking Sunn O))) out at least once, they definitely put on a show unlike any other band, metal or otherwise.

September 29, 2009
Categories: Concert Reviews, Drone, Sonar, Talking Head Club . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: 2 Comments

First Post

All right you mother fuckers, this is my brand spankin new DC heavy metal blog. I have many names, Chewie, RapeJesus, Butt-Rash, Badass McAwesome, Shutup Asshole etc… but the most popular seems to be Metal Chris so that’s what I’m going to go by on here. This blog template still looks retarded as I write this, and hell I might even switch from this WordPress BS, but  I wanted to post today. It’s September 11th and to commemorate the atrocities religion brought us on this day 8 years ago, I’m starting my metal blog. If you want a description of what to expect here, you can find that in the About section, I don’t feel like repeating it in detail here, but basically I’m sick of not having a good website for all the info on heavy metal in the DC area. I’ve found myself scraping this info together for quite some time simply so I can know what the fuck is going on in regards to heavy metal, and I figured I might as well post this info to the net cause maybe there’s some other people out there who would like this info but are too damn lazy to do it themselves. Well you lazy asses, you’re lucky that I’ve got a metal addiction and spare time! I plan on hoarding relevant links on this page as well, so you don’t even have to bother reading my inane drivel if you don’t want. Also, I’ll try to link band names to their MySpace pages so you can listen to their music there if you want, and I’ll link album names to their listings on Metal Archives, if possible, and I’ll link song names to their pages on Songza so you can stream the song to listen to it, if the song is available that is.

Since this is the first post I’ll be a bit all over the place, normally I’ll try to keep different subjects in different posts for clarity’s sake. Currently I’m listening to the new Dying Fetus album, Descend Into Depravity, that comes out officially on Sept 15th. I just got it as a 320k rip from vinyl today off of the net. Now if you’re looking for it, there’s been a lot of fakes of this floating around, particularly one by a ripping crew going by the initials TRI. That is really just Dying Fetus’ 2007 album, War Of Attrition, with the tracks mixed up and the song and file names changed to the track listing on the upcoming album. Anyways, this is my first listen to Descend Into Depravity and it’s not bad. I really didn’t like their previous album War Of Attrition at all but this one seems better. Not as many break downs as I was expecting, but that’s ok. The drums are pretty standard death metal but they’ve kept the intensity in the guitar work. And for those who don’t know, Dying Fetus is from the DC area, probably the biggest death metal band from the area actually. They really were at their peak with their albums Killing On Adrenaline and my personal favorite Destroy The Opposition, after which most of the band left to become Misery Index, tho the drummer, Kevin Talley, has since left Misery Index also and now plays with Dååth. Anyways, if you want to check them out I recommend Destroy The Opposition before their newer stuff. I don’t believe Dying Fetus has any tour dates in the area any time soon, or I’d mention that here.

OK, so now that I’ve at least talked a bit of metal here, I’ll mention that I totally need to redesign this site’s appearance. I need some Photoshop skills to do that, which I simply don’t have. So until I can get someone to actually put the ideas I have into digital form, and do it for free, it’s not going to be ideal in appearance. Also, I’m still figuring out this WordPress stuff so we’ll see. I may just switch to another website before moving tons of posts to another site becomes a pain in the ass. Also, I need to figure out how to get some nice looking calendar widgets on here so I can have a calendar for upcoming metal shows in the area as well as upcoming album releases of note. I’ve seen a cool one on Bands In Town, but they don’t list every venue (and thus not every concert can be added). Since I don’t have those things set up currently, I’ll just list a bunch of them now. Here’s the upcoming albums of note (I’m probably missing some so deal):

Megadeth – Endgame (Sept 15)
Dying Fetus – Descend Into Depravity (Sept 15)
Black Sabbath reissues w/ Bonus Tracks (Sept 21st)
Echoes Of Eternity – As Shadows Burn (Sept 22)
Marduk – Wormwood (Sept 24)
Immortal – All Shall Fall (Sept 25)
Arckanum – Þyrmir EP (Sept 25)
Azaghal – Teraphim (Sept 28)
Arch Enemy – The Root Of All Evil (re-recording pre-Angela material) (Sept 28)
Alice In Chains – Black Gives Way to Blue (Sept 29)
Belphegor – Walpurgis Rites – Hexenwahn
Cannabis Corpse – The Weeding EP (Oct 12)
Portal – Swarth (Oct 20)
Gorgoroth – Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt (Oct 21)
Hypocrisy – A Taste Of Extreme Divinity (Oct 23)
Dark Tranquillity – Where Death Is Most Alive (DVD) (Oct 26)
Pelican – What We All Come To Need (Oct 27)
Vreid – Milorg (Oct 27)
Slayer – World Painted Blood (Nov 2)
Katatonia – Night Is The New Day (Nov 2)
Impious – Death Domination (Nov 6)

Note that I list whichever date is earliest for the release date, US, Europe, Japan, whatever. Since the internet makes it pointless for bands to release albums on different dates in different countries, I just go with whichever is first. Most of the important ones leak online before the release dates anyways. Well, here’s some of the upcoming metal shows to the DC area (I’ll list other areas when I get a calendar working):

Samael @ Jaxx on Fri 16 Oct – They aren’t headlining, Moonspell is, but the latest Samael album, Above, was surprisingly awesome!

AC/DC @ the Verizon Center on Fri 16 Oct – Tix are already on sale, so if ya feel like spending over $100 for bad seats, go for it!

God Dethroned @ Jaxx on Sun 18 Oct – The openers suck, but I’ve never seen em live so I’m curious about their live show.

Dethklok @ the Patriot Center on Sat 31 Oct – I think it’s GA only for this show, floor “seats” only for this Halloween show.

Ensiferum, Hypocrisy and Ex Deo @ Jaxx on Fri 6 Nov – I wish Hypocrisy was headlining but oh well, and Ex Deo is basically Kataklysm trying to be the Nile of ancient Rome, but not as technical.

Eluveitie, Belphegor and Vreid @ Jaxx on Thurs 12 Nov – Vreid is basically Windir minus the guy who wrote all the songs (he died), but still I really wanna see them cause they’re pretty good.

Pelican @ the Rock & Roll Hotel on Fri 4 Dec – They’re an instrumental band somewhere between The Fucking Champs and Dysrhythmia.

Gwar @ 9:30 Club Thurs 10 Dec – Good ol Richmond natives Gwar, playing the 9:30 Club in December again.

Well, that’s it for my first post. Hopefully this blog will become more kick ass over time. No idea how frequently I’ll post, it will probably depend on how often metal news in the DC area comes out. Feel free to follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/metalchris and I’ll post links to new entries as soon as I post them here. Keep it brutal DC!

September 11, 2009
Categories: Death Metal, Local Band Info, Upcoming Album Releases, Washington DC / Maryland / Virginia Metal Scene . Tags: , , , , , , , , . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: 2 Comments

« Previous Page Next page