WEEK OF 12/13/2019

Matianak / all 📷 : Mick Reed

If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to go deaf, than Nick Fury and the organizers of Forever Deaf Fest would have had you covered this past weekend. This was the second year of the Fest which germinated from the idea; what if Open Air but not dead? Well, they certainly had the “not dead” covered with a full slate of local and local-ish death, doom, and post-metal to keep your heart pumping and your blood hot enough to stave off frostbite during another relentless Chicago winter. FDF took over the Beat Kitchen on December 6th and 7th after kicking off at the Cobra Lounge on the 5th. I wasn’t able to see all of it due to work and familial obligations, but metal is for the working man, and I saw enough to say definitively that I will be dropping in on FDF 2020 whether I am graced with a press pass or not.

The vibe of the Fest hit me pretty hard when I arrived at the Cobra Lounge on Thursday. A kind of anti-climax hung in the air and carried on throughout the proceeding nights. This sounds like it would be a bad thing, but it wasn’t. The forced hype of most festivals is frankly exhausting. I have a laundry list of miseries that I could enumerate in excruciating detail regarding the way music-anchored events try to foist a sense of momentousness upon you, which always inevitably just leaves you feeling manipulated and tired before the first act even finishes with the sound check. It’s one of the reasons I will never go to Lollapalooza and the main reason that I am always down for a low-key metal fest. However, it is possible for a fest to be relaxed to a fault as well, where bands and fans are confused about who is expected to play and when, or the promoter could fail to anticipate the popularity of the event and over-selling the capacity of the room where it becomes dangerously overcrowded, or musicians and patrons get way too high, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, the venue could forget to stock enough beer and liquor. FDF kind of fell in the sweet spot between just prepared enough and not overly worried about the execution. On the down side, the flyers from this year were confusingly similar to the ones from the year before, and during the show, bands would more or less start playing without warning. On the other hand, there was plenty of booze and elbow room, and the bands sounded great when they did play, so the overall score balanced out to a net positive.

The bands really were on their own schedule, though. Thursday opener Everything Must Die started playing while I was still answering emails in a booth at the Cobra Lounge. I was in the middle of drafting a message when I heard a serious fucking racket coming from the club area. “There was no way that they are starting already,” I thought to myself. So I went to check it out, and god dammit they had started already. So I ordered another beer, packed up my laptop, got a stamp on my wrist, and walked face-first into a wall of shrieking mayhem. Everything Must Die is one of those sloppy, sophomoric, and unapologetically offensive grindcore bands that you thought went extinct around the same time MTV2 stopped playing music videos (roughly the mid ‘00s, as memory serves). Their official tagline is “Smoke Weed, Eat People,” and their debut EP has a burning church on the cover. With all the boxes checked,  we were off to a great start.

Everything Must Die was followed by the phenomenal young bloods, Inner Decay. There are a lot of promising death metal bands out there, but few pull it off with the straight-faced violence of Inner Decay. They have an earthy melodic quality to their assault on the listener’s mind and body. Like In Flames doing a Dying Fetus impression, or Amon Amarth clawing its way out of Cannibal Corpse, chest-burster style. I was thoroughly impressed with the raw, brutal quality of their performance, and their 2018 debut LP Souls of War has been on rotation for me ever since. As much as I was vibing on Inner Decay’s set, it left me a little thirsty for some gravity-magnifying breakdowns. Thankfully, local deathgrind outfit Gloryhole Guillotine followed in short order to slack my breakdown thrist. The deliciously tasteless quality of their name carries over into their gruesomely gratuitous sound. Tight, undulating chord progressions, violently mutating grooves, bone-dry blastbeats, and warring choke/croak death vocals. They’re awash in bad taste, but you can’t bring yourself to spit them out.

Thursday ended undeniably strong with headliner Matianak, a theatrical blackened death group that leans hard into the primitivism aesthetic of second wave black metal with a distinctly Indonesian twist. The entire band dressed in furs and viscera, and their mic stand appeared to be made of an inside-out steer and doubled as a perversely pagan altar. Watching them perform was like watching an exorcism in practice, with the devil coming out as the clear victor in the altercation. I’m not someone who is intimidated by musicians, but I honestly feel shaken and unmoored by what I witnessed during their performance. One look from their lead singer peering at you from behind her corpse paint is enough to make you feel as though your soul may be in serious peril. It might sound like hacky hyperbole to say that a band had cast a spell over the audience, but in this singular context, I think it’s not only appropriate, but necessary. Part performance art, part Impurity meets OS Behemoth, Matianak is truly one of the most unique acts in Chicago at the moment, and you have to see them in person to appreciate the terrible power of their charismatic and malevolently magnetic performance.

As previously mentioned, the Beat Kitchen hosted FDF on Friday and Saturday, and while the remainder to the Fest never quite reached the horrible heights of Matianak’s set, it was not without its highlights. Death metal continued to rule the roost on Friday with brutal exhibitions by bands at opposite ends of the tech-death spectrum with Minneapolis’ Reaping Asmodeia and Chicago’s own Broken Hope rounding out the night. Reaping Asmodeia’s bass, drum, and vocal combo carpet bombed us with djent riffs and devastatingly brutal breakdowns. Their style of deathcore doesn’t veer as hard into punk as say, Thy Art is Murder, but they deliver it with an attitude that can’t be described in any other way. Tightly coiled, blindly polished, and ruthlessly deployed, Reaping Asmodeia are a killing machine custom-built to murder expectations with extreme prejudice. In the opposite corner of Friday night’s headliner bought, weighing in at 1,000 pounds of palm-muted beat-down riffs and Grade-A, au jus slathered Italian beef, was Broken Hope.

There isn’t a lot of overlap between gore metal and technical death metal, but to the extent that the territory between these sub-genre’s merge, Broken Hope has established a homestead there. They boast some of the wettest, mucilage bubble forming death gurgling this side of a prehistoric tar pit, backed by some increasingly athletic and unapologetically prodigious guitar work, seemingly tailor-made to bait Suffocation into a sonic arms race. If you’re neck wasn’t sore Saturday morning from all the headbanging this pair of hell-raisers induced, it’s because you left early, and if that was you, then you did yourself zero favors, my friend.    

The final evening of the festivities, was reserved for the stoners and headcases amongst us. Beginning with a quick puff of jammy alt-metal by way of Inebrium and winding down with a long pull of that granddaddy of all pipe-dreamers, The Skull, Saturday was all about maintaining your mellow. No other band could have set this mood better than stone-cold drone daddies and recent Chicago transplants, Canyon of the Skull whose dusty twenty minute slices of deep resonant American was sure to inspire some resin inhalation, or at least induce some kind of contact high. If you were afraid of getting too sleepy and crashing before the headliner though, fear not, because Snow Burial came in like a hurricane to shake you from your sticky slumber with obtuse, fuzz-baked chords and abstract arrangements that invoked the Melvins as much as post-rock raconteurs, Mogwai. Snow Burial are one of a surprising number of bands in the Chicago area that are really pushing the limits of what is commonly considered heavy metal, charting canyons of emotional depth while retaining the genre’s fundamental raw power and hyper-realness. I’d rank Snow Burial as a band to watch for those interested in seeing what can be done with metal’s playbook beyond the brutal and blasphemous, and would rank them along with Pelican, Russian Circles, and Huntsmen as vanguards of the scene in this regard.

The penultimate band on Saturday’s schedule doesn’t sound like a metal band in any traditional sense. Huntsmen indulges in slow acoustic passages, brittle melodies, and folky harmonies, all of which seem more at home in Nashville than the forges of northwestern Illinois. If it weren’t for the fact that these more wholesome elements are juxtaposed with Obsessed-indebted fuzz rock ‘n’ ruckus, caustic howling vocals, and lyrics depicting loss, addiction, and emulation, you’d be forgiven for thinking you stumbled into a Justine Townes Earle show by mistake. But Earle was not in the house that evening, and we were instead witness to the triumph of one the more beautifully conceived rock acts to emerge from this half of the ‘10s. Bathed in golden light, it was hard not to treasure the intimacy of Huntsmen’s performance and the deep pain and joy their music spoke to in all of us. This was the first time that I had the pleasure to see Huntsmen perform, and I can imagine that anytime they play, they manage to cultivate a sense of finality and completeness. They felt like the main event. Certainly a hard act to follow. Thankfully, the headliners that evening were old pros and more than up to the task of closing out the night.

The Skull are about as old school as they get. They looked like a bunch of bikers who pulled in to jam to some heavy tunes and acted like it, too, even after taking the stage. The Skull were there to party, but that didn’t get in the way of them putting on a killer show. Now, I’m not going to lie, I’m a hardcore kid at heart and I can only deal with so much low and slow stoner rock before I tune out. I had basically hit my limit with Canyon earlier in the evening and wasn’t in the mood for another droning detour. Thankfully, that’s not what we got. The ramming rollick of The Skull’s guitar work, punishing percussion, and bewitching command of the stage grabbed and held my attention through to the final foggy downstroke. The Skull delivered the hits you were hoping for and right on target, too. Burning through cult classics “The Endless Road Turns Dark” like a freshman in college through a fresh dime bag, and finishing up with a little bit of vintage Trouble, all the while lead singer Eric Wagner solicited party favors from the crowd, which they gleefully obliged, passing up several full glasses of beer, and at one point, a hash pipe. And you better believe Wagner ripped that bad boy on stage, looking like a cross between Jeff Lebowski and a pissed-off Gandalf while doing so. It was a total downer when The Skull pulled the plug on their amps and packed it in for the night. Their set felt like it could have lasted all night, but alas, it did not. Too much of a good thing can be hazardous to your health after all, and I need to save some party (and my hearing) for 2020.  

 -Mick Reed