I walked into The Great Untamed, a bar/small venue popular for its locally-brewed wine and mead. Immediately, Adam Croft, the curator for many of these shows, asked me for a 10 dollar donation, for which I traded out a 20 dollar bill. Before the show, a man talked about driving here from Denver, excited for Thou's set. He had seen an acoustic set not long before in Denver, and was curious what he would see this time. Various doom metal was playing over the speakers; I even hear a bit of True Widow at one point. I compliment someone's Portal shirt as Adam sits upon his drum throne and thanks everyone for coming out before starting the show.
Euth
Euth are the Laramie "false grind" project of vocalist James Reed, Guitarist Nate Fitzgerald, Bassist Mike something, and drummer Adam Croft. The sound is pretty loud and noisy, incorporating blackened tones with a hardcore punk attitude and structures in the tradition of mathcore and grind, various stops and shifts in time and tempo abound. James shrieks a dissonant treble over the burgeoning wall of sound, harmonized with the occasional feedback squeals ringing out. The set ends on a relatively doomy showcase, a consistently pounding bass leading us deeper and deeper into a sonic ash.Being an infrequent listener of Euth, I always find it somewhat difficult to note specific preferred songs through their set, experiencing it as a barrage of hardcore riffs and constantly evolving energy. Much of this can be attributed to the skills of Croft himself who pounds with incredible precision. He guides the band through the rise and fall in intensity while keeping a restrained head on his shoulders, breaking into new speeds and moments of borderline noise kept afloat only by his constant stick alternations. He also keeps a fair bit of originality in the sound, as much of the sound could easily fall into the various death metal and hardcore tropes in the hands of a more brutish drummer with a double bass, but the expertise on display allows for something much more primitive and fresh.
Check out their songs here.
Between shows, I overheard a conversation about using Garageband as an Iphone app, and clumsily related a story about an old friend supposedly recreating the sound of Deathconsciousness from it. The man replied he could barely stand to even look at his phone for 10 minutes and I nodded in agreement. But the conversation went on, and I was feeling fairly socially awkward. I flipped through a Penguin edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and watched the next artist setup what looked like an Ipad with messy scribbles across the supporting felt cover plugged in to mouse pad and several pedals. I managed to grab a pair of earplugs from Euth's bassist, who tells me this act is going to be loud.
Many Blessings
Many Blessings is the solo act of Ethan McCarthy, the singer of Denver's doom/sludge outfit Primitive Man. Here, his sound leans to the nosier tendencies of Primitive Man, but with a much more ambient sample-based approach. The set begins with wind sounds meditatively blown across the room, adjusted with what seems an equalizer sweeping through and blanketed by a soft reverb. This flows in and out of the sounds of rain and a voice sample with the cinematic virtuoso and voice of perhaps a Godspeed You! Black Emperor interlude mumbling that "there's a man who's begging, and he was praying, I guess...but God never showed up." The sample repeats in chopped cycles and is pitched lower and distorted, layered upon by a sudden high scream and animal squeals as if spliced from some lost Nurse with Wound tape before fading into a meandering low synth.At this point, the set lets itself settle into a lulling hypnosis, a drone as heavy as any Time Machines cut while conjuring echoes of Gnaw Their Tongues. Bells and quiet screams invade the confined space, and a microphone is blown on and hummed into as the song slowly builds tension like some of the latter half of Yellow Swans's output. The restraint brings the tension to insurmountable levels before finally being released in that familiar Merzbow-burst of digital noise, incomprehensible and instantly averting the ears, yet inviting, and inspiring a strong ASMR tingle down my neck. This is released with the most uncanny sample of "Stop looking at me/don't fucking look at me again" repeated into oblivion. I was left with utmost awe by the time the last traces of resonance fled the air.
His music can be found here.
Lingua Ignota
Somehow, I had not realized reading the poster beforehand and watching her perform at the show that the Lingua Ignota before my eyes was the same Lingua Ignota who recorded the phenomenal All Bitches Die last year, the album currently sitting as the second greatest Death Industrial album of all time on RYM.com. Somehow, I even managed to think the voice sounded similar to that album who's name was just on the tip of my tongue, but had evaded me the whole set. This really is not someone who should have played somewhere as small as a suggested donation show in Laramie, Wyoming, much like Thou who I will get to in a bit.Rather than destroying us with the noise which so permeates her album, she focuses on the more classical sides of her work as she adds reverb to a piano and begins a cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene," tricking us for a typical ballad with lines like "Jolene, I'm begging of you, please don't take my man." But the lines become incredibly desperate, ranging from the sweet twittering of Newsom into the haunting destruction of Jarboe, retaining a strain of Gothic muskiness a la Anna von Hausswolff and some of the direct freakishness of Natalie Rose Lebrecht or even a little Cukor Bila Smert' at times. Her emotions overtake her words as she warbles cries and sings overtones with unexpected power, like a Hindustani singer trapped in Greek tragedy.
This falls off into a couple more songs, ending on a beautiful performance of "Disease of Men," lacking the hopeless sample and piano standing in for organs. This makes it all incredibly minimal and brings out the skill of her playing and emotion in her voice even more as she sorrowfully delivers "I am the plague of man/I am the cancer," repeated over the chorale-structured chords in a chant of David Thomas Broughton-levels of insanity, yet retaining emotional presence through each new wave of sounds.
As the show ended, I noticed a sticker on the back of her laptop for The Rita, and said I quite appreciated it and included that I'd been listening to Thousands of Dead Gods on rotation lately. She told me she was a good friend of his, referring to him as "a crazy dude," and remarked she liked my Daughters shirt that I had bought at a concert a couple weeks prior. I have learned she had actually opened for them a month before this show, and honestly, had I made the connection to her recordings, I don't know if I could have committed the awkwardness of just striking up a brief conversation about music, but remain glad that I did.
I highly recommend you buy her music here.
MJ Guider
MJ Guider is the ambient/dream pop project of Melissa Guion (playing with others) from Louisiana on tour with Thou. The project's last album has managed a release on legendary label Kranky, putting my hopes up fairly high. The band started off strumming their guitar and bass with so many pedals on each, they emitted nearly Eno levels of shimmering ambience, but with darker chords, plunging them into the territory of a less distorted loveliescrushing. There is so much reverb, the songs feel as if they are played in another room at times, working into a trance akin to the dronier aspects of some hypnagogia. The sound is mysterious as a drum machine kicks in with cold, repetitive beats sounding slightly delayed, a little minimal/ambient techno at times, but very cold and mechanical. The lower female vocals are fairly sensual, somewhat ghostly and demure, and completely incomprehensible, not far above something like Grouper, or spoken with ghostly hints of Laurie Anderson. Synths are played over all of this, sometimes icy, but often blending in a strong atmosphere, swaying with the swagger of The XX. The aesthetics are on par, a song like "Lit Negative" providing a dancy and darkly compelling groove. I certainly hadn't heard anything so dreamy pass through Laramie in my time going to these shows. I was concerned that the music was turned down so much for the tight space that I could often hear the click of the guitar strums, but this was a minor inconvenience for quite a compelling set.
Listen to their stuff here.
Thou
Thou are a doom/sludge outfit from Louisiana. Their album Heathen has been named the greatest metal album of 2014 by Pitchfork. Their fusion of doom metal with punk and black metal textures is often credited a revolutionizing contribution for the doom genre in recent years. Again, these guys are much too big to be playing a venue like Laramie, Wyoming.The setup is surprisingly minimal in terms of pedals, but boasts three guitarists along with bassist, singer, and drummer. Some country song is playing before the show which the singer satirically drawls along to before interrupting with a blast of sound. It is sick and low, making every surface of my skin buzz excitedly. The beginning is certainly very punk in spite of the heaviness, and the drummer is playing incredibly fast rolling over the toms in a bridge which builds up and explodes once again in a frenzy. The next song is slower and more of the typical Sleep/Electric Wizard bluesy-stoner sound, but pounds out with a power and energy which often dominates the room with an Eyehategod brutality. The vocalist screams like he's possessed, and the song trudges on and on, everyone banging heads along in unison, ending with the singer giving an ironic farewell to the late George H. W. Bush with a "thank God, finally."
As the show developed, fluctuations in their sound revealed a melodic and emotional undercurrent to their sound, atmospheric black metal riffing revealing more to their repertoire than pure noise and sludge. One is filled by this heavy, dark presence along with the typically numbing sensation much doom gives off. Songs diverge into slow, sludgy detours as per much doom, but gives surprise when the drummer begins to play double time and the guitar lineup gives incredibly shrill accents of noise fed back and back again. Their final song kept trudging and declining, but refusing to give up, keeping the whole audience locked in pure sound and weight before letting it fall out in the night's final resonance in a set that, in spite of a 5-band lineup, still seemed all too short for the incredible musicianship and composition on display.To check out their music, click here.
