Suidakra, the band we came early for, wound up putting on the strongest set of the night.  Their songs weld melodic death metal openings, to Celtic folk chant finales.  This produces just the right sequence of flying hair, fist pumping, and shout-alongs, for a great show.  It is a bit odd to hear thick german accents, fresh off an Irish drinking song, and leading into fiery Gothenburg-tinged guitar leads.  Metal is rife with subgenres, and many of them overlap in odd ways.  Suidakra fits pagan-, viking-, folk-, and melodic death-metal.  Pagan and Folk are ethos descriptors and  Viking is a lyrical descriptor.   Their sound is influenced by Celtic Folk, but not all folk metal can be lumped together since the folk music means different things in different cultures.

Alestorm, the second band, is a subgenre unto themselves:  True Scottish Pirate Metal.  If that sounds like a party and a half, it is.   Before the show, we angsted a bit about what to wear, whether to dress for a typical metal show (all black, with band shirt), or to hit up Lucy in Disguise, and go in full-on pirate regalia.  Since we were coming from Karaoke League, costumes wouldn't have been out of place, but in the end we ran short of time.  We did see others at the show who'd gone the party city route, and come in some very halloween-y pirate gear.  The band's only visual claim to piracy was the guitarist' kilt.  It didn't matter, though, their stage presence was ample.  From the KEYtar-enabled antics of the singer,  to their onstage comradery, it was chant-along power metal drinking songs at their finest.  Alestorm pretty much do what it says on the pirate-metal tin, with great stage banter in a thick Scottish accent:  "This song is about wenches and mead.  It's called 'Wenches and Mead'"

Unfortunately, the crowd thinned substantially before Týr came on.  Unfortunately for those who left, at least.  The guys came out for their soundcheck in tight black clothing, but then retreated backstage to return for the show in full leather armor, branded in runes.  Týr hails from the Faroe Islands, and incorporate tradition Faroese folk elements into their viking-related songs.  Most clean vocals in folk/power metal feel cheesy, compared to the affected authenticity of punk/hardcore/indie vocals, but Týr's use of traditional chants and native language mitigate this.  I find it easier to enjoy the deliberately melodic vocals when they're in that context.  Traditional vocals go with traditional stories, go with traditional melodies, in a way that feels authentic, if emotionally reserved.

1. I think, I can't find any info on them (back ↩)

1. Thursday: Opeth at Monarch event center.  Monarch Event Center used to be a movie theater, it's not anywhere near Red River and 6th, it's in a strip mall off Airport Blvd.  Not only that, they hung plastic butterflies (get it? monarch?) on shiny strings from the ceiling at 4' intervals.  The string of metal kids queueing through the parking lot was all kinds of incongruous.
   • Baroness:  Your bog-standard post-metal band, longform crescendo dynamics.  At least they didn't take themselves too seriously, with the singer playing his guitar by beating it against his head, and grinning furiously through the entire set.
   • High on Fire:  Nobody takes themselves less seriously than Matt Pike, though.  The straightforward sweatyshirtlessmacho presence perfectly compliments their hard-hitting wall of sound and shouted anthems.
   • Opeth:  I'm an Opeth fanboi, I admit.  A couple of false starts on A Fair Judgement and Face of Melinda are the only complaints.  I love everything about their shows, the stage banter, the crowd that knows all the stops and starts of all the songs on all 8 albums.
2. Friday: Wolves in The Throne Room at Red 7.  I love the oddball pairings of shows between the patio and the main stage, and this was no exception, with the super-indie crowd outside and the black metal kids spilling outside to smoke.  In South America or Russia, this would probably have resulted in a riot, in Austin, I wasn't the only metal kid enjoying the blistering emocore:
   • Bridge and Tunnel: An accidental show, outside on the patio while smoking and waiting for the show inside.  I loved the two songs I heard from CYSTSFTS, but hadn't done anything about it, there's only so much music I can dig into in a year. Definitely digging into them now, though.  Their high-speed mid-90's emocore with 3 layered vocalists is great.
   • Nachtmystium: Their latest album, Assassins, lays bare their worship of Pink Floyd, from the Black Meddle subtitle, and the opening cover of One Of These Days (I'm going to cut you into pieces).   They're in a tough niche, though, going up against Enslaved, who incorporate more psychadelia in their black metal at every outing.  Nachtmystium has other tricks up their sleeves, though, pulling punk-ish shouted choruses into the mix, making their show an electric, fist-pumping shout-along, more so even than HoF the night before.  They encored with a Motorhead cover, and it's appropriate.  They retain the aggression of metal, despite their psychadelic experimentation.
   • WITTR: Their albums alternate between atmospheric pieces and pieces played so fast, and so sonically compressed, that they feel ambient, because they just wash over you.  Live, they have a similiar disconnect, but the effect is completely different.  Their frontman doesn't look very metal, his short haircut, beard,  and overly large glasses belie their eco-terrorist ethos.  At the start of the set, he removes the glasses, and performs with his eyes closed for the duration.  Live, the vocals are not buried in the mix, there's a man screaming his lungs out, completely entranced by his performance, and a brutal assault of insanely fast black metal that's too intense to participate in, even the band is headbanging at a quarter the speed of their riffs.
3. Sunday: Mucca Pazza at Maker Faire:  Maker Faire was all kinds of brilliant.  We saw robot wars, mentos/diet coke fountains, the world's largest mousetrap, and Mucca Pazza were the completely fitting end to it all.  I happened to arrive at the right moment, to be followed by the band as they danced/marched from the mousetrap to their sun drenched fire truck of a stage.  Their show is bungle-esque, this is the third time I've seen them (twice at Looptopia), and they're a blast every time.

Burst - Lazarus Bird

Burst has been moving slowly deeper into the genre, from what were crust/hardcore roots.  In Coveting Ways was their peak of layered, spacey, labyrinthine arrangements.  Origo should have cemented their leadership in the genre, but poorly arranged good cop/bad cop vocals and compressed production hurt its appeal.  Lazarus Bird fixes all that, it's their finest album yet.  The clean vocals now stand on their own, layered in their own right, and more tightly integrated than just a counterpoint to the heavier elements.  Linus' hardcore vocals have become more expressive as well, including growls, spoken passages, allowing the shouts to be more emotional, by not being so repetitive.  The songs from their myspace are still the standouts from the album, though Cripple God is enhanced by the end of Momentum - There are plenty of songs that waffle in abstract sounds for more than half their length before exploding back into metal territory.

IntrOnaut - Prehistoricisms

IntrOnaut's follow up to their well received (a 10 on Blabbermouth) Void was also released this Tuesday.  Where their previous efforts played on the progressive polyrhythms of the likes of Meshuggah, the previous spacey elements have now exploded into longer fusion-jazz in a completely metal aesthetic.  Unlike Cynic, or other prog/fusion metal bands who mix jazz sounds into metal, IntrOnaut just plays fusion like it's metal, never letting up the heavy.

Kylesa/Pinback

I closed out the week by seeing Kylesa at Mohawk.  Kind of an odd show, they were opening for Pinback.  Nonetheless, the first few rows of the crowd were full of older, tattooed dudes, rocking out.  The sound was a bit muddy, as you would expect for a sludge band with 2 drummers, but as the set got tighter, so did the sound.

Pinback was plagued by a multitude of issues.  The last time I saw them, shortly after Offcell, their fastest and most electric EP, they played all their songs twice as fast.  This time, at least their tempo was more level.  I really shouldn't expect a band formed by a bunch of studio musicians to be able to translate their flawless albums to a great live show.  The overlayed vocal and guitar harmonies comes across as rich and beautiful on their albums, but seem too much too fast, live.

Mohawk has built a new concrete block wall, presumably to shield the new condos across the street from the brunt of the sound.  I can't imagine it's helping them much, since Pinback were assaulted by music from Club De Ville next door, and music from indoors at Mohawk.  For a band as understated as Pinback, that's a pretty major issue.  They were also plagued by a faulty slideshow, and a broken sampler, which weren't huge obstacles, except that they all seemed very awkward and frustrated by the setup.

By the end of the set, though, they started coming together.  Frenetic songs like Fortress and From Nothing to Nowhere go better with the live aesthetic.  They closed with AFK, my personal favorite, before the encore.  When they came back, Rob took over on keys, and their touring keyboardist took up the bass.  The result was a warmer, softer sound, that was better suited to most of their songs.

Last night's film, while familiar, didn't tug the homesick chord nearly as much as The Dark Knight did, though.  The first Christopher Nolan Batman film had some "hey, I've been there" moments, but it was mostly very CG-affected.  The Dark Knight, by contrast, lives in Chicago.  There are no odd jumps between distant places in the city;  scenes are in consistent places, when they leave one building, they move down real streets to neighboring buildings.  It was almost disturbing, in the sense that Batman wasn't in a fantasy world, he was in a very present time and place.  The last film to live this close to me was High Fidelity, although John Cusack could have been me or any of my friends (unlike Batman).  It's a testament to Nolan's film that the familiarity didn't disrupt the suspension of disbelief.

Heath Ledger as The Joker

I loved the character arcs in Batman Begins, they felt very believable and human.  The Dark Night is much more straightforward in that sense, following the standard comic book patterns.  This film, then, works much harder to keep your attention.  The twists and turns of the plot more resemble Memento: more elements being added, takes more effort to keep up, which distracts you from the inevitability of the conclusion.  It's a great film, whether you're from Chicago or not.

Wikipedia's article follows straight into the same failures, by depending more on the book, and record sales, than logicoriginal research, or on online articles from authors not trying to push more units, and actually interested in the groundswell.

I'm bringing this up, because I went to the Dethklok show last night.  Dethklok's album, released last year, was the highest charting death metal album (#19) to date¹  But after suffering through Chimaira's set, it's clear that unless we pay more attention to Pitchfork²  than wikipedia, NWOAHM is going to follow "new metal" right into the terrible rhythm-based non-music of nu-metal.  Chimaira's songs actually include "choruses" (gang vocals/shouting) like "I HATE EVERYONE". It's godsmack/disturbed/mudvayne all over again.

That anyone could think of referring to them as "groove metal" having seen Soilent Green's death/grind performance 15 minutes beforehand, is absurd.  Soilent Green has intense tempo shifts in their songs, that would actually make you shake your ass, if you weren't so busy throwing horns and/or invisible oranges.  And they have the decency to not to take themselves so seriously.  The singer referenced their 'old stuff', only to remind himself by polling the audience that very few in the audience had ever seen them before.  It was a great show, although I do much prefer their latest album to their older stuff

Dethklok was exactly as amazing as I imagined.  The show did start with a commercial for the new battlefield game, which would have been pretty annoying, if we weren't about to watch a cartoon.  The show leads off with a bit about turning fans into mutants in an attempt to subvert their economic influence.  When the band took the stage, it was at first easy to pay attention to Mike Keneally and Brendan Small trading solos, and the live band just generally being awesome.  After a few relatively narrative song-isodes on screen, the cartoon turned towards performance based, and it was easy to forget that there was a live band onstage.  Mike Keneally did a fantastic job, despite having gone gray since the last time I saw him (Wood + Smoke tour, at Martyr's).  I do wonder, though, if the animated interludes between every other song were as much for the band to rest as for the amusement of the audience.  My only gripe with the show was that Austin Music Hall's A/C could not even come close to dealing with thr crowd.  Despite being here for SXSW, and having seen a couple of outdoor shows here, this was the hottest show I've been to since Lollapalooza day 2.

1. Since then, albums by Opeth and Children of Bodom have followed closely (#23 & #21 respectively), which speaks to a real groundswell for extreme metal. (back ↩)
2. When I think of the recent upturn in metal, I think of bands like Mastodon, ISIS, Sunn O), who have garnered indie-rock followings right alongside metal followings.  That following has spilled over into other metal bands, generally reviving the genre as worthy of mainstream attention.  Metalcore bands like Chimaira, Trivium, et al, fail to attract anyone who's not interested in being part of "the scene". (back ↩)