Austin Web Designer - Adam Freetly

Too many shows to make full length single show reviews:

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.