Fuck the Facts, Dreaming Dead @ The Arena
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Fuck the Facts and Dreaming Dead played at The Arena in Philadelphia on July 4. The Arena hosts boxing and wrestling matches; parts of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler were filmed there. It is a big room with a high ceiling. Early in the afternoon on this first day of the Hostile City Death Fest, the Arena was desolate. Instead of a fighting ring in the middle, a stage sat against a wall. A barrier blockaded the stage from ten feet out. This was unnecessary, as there were maybe 50 attendees, not counting vendors, in this 1000+ capacity room. The promoter's gamble to hold a fest on a holiday didn't pay off. With no bar (Day 2 of the Deathfest was BYOB) and a chilly temperature, the venue might as well have been the moon.
Dreaming Dead - Perpetual PretextFuck the Facts - Driving Through Fallen Cities
Yet Los Angeles' Dreaming Dead did the best they could. They are a young band, and it showed. Their stage presence was a little off. One guitarist and the bassist whipped long hair around majestically, while one guitarist gamely shook a short bob. The drummer's blastbeats were tappity-tap soft. (The Arena's echo chamber acoustics didn't help.) Death metal drummers should sound like they want to kill you. Still, vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Elliott (nee Schall) kept the set aloft. She is a consummate shredder, etching out riffs with precision and speed. Pick squeals erupted from her with delightful regularity. Elliott's attack is eerily Chuck Schuldiner-esque, with raspy growls over spidery riffs. She executed both with mastery. If her bandmates catch up to her, their thrashy death metal should go far.
Canada's Fuck the Facts are seasoned veterans, and it showed. Vocalist Mel Mongeon evokes Henry Rollins' warrior poses. She constantly coils and uncoils, bounding up on monitors, crouching down low, shrieking, growling, spitting. Her eye contact is not rehearsed. She is fully "in" her performance, and if she stares daggers through you, it is incidental and fleeting. (Converge's Jacob Bannon likewise flouts eye contact conventions.) Her band's grindcore meshes Godfleshian harmonics and tectonic sludge with punishing blastbeats. After years of experimentation, the band has gotten down to business. Stage banter is minimal, limited mostly to song introductions. Transitions between songs are vaguely unsettling soundbites. The band executes violent tempo changes in sync, without eye contact. On this afternoon, the audience was seemingly galaxies away. Still, one could hear Mongeon scream in space.
Buy:
Fuck the Facts (CD)
Dreaming Dead (MP3)
Labels: canada, clee, death metal, features, grindcore, live, usa
2 Comments:
I went on Sunday for a chunk of the day and from what people told me, there were even less people. I have a feeling the promoter must have taken quite a haircut this weekend. Having it on 4th of July weekend and charging $35 a day is pretty nuts. I think they could have done a lot better with a lower ticket price and some more aggressive promotion. But, hey what the hell do I know about promoting shows?
Here’s my rundown of the bands I saw:
XXXManiak -- Not only were they lame, they were fucking disgusting – let’s just say it involved the guitarist pulling wads of live earthworms from his Scooby Doo underpants (which was all he had on) and alternately throwing handfuls into the audience and shoving handfuls in his mouth. Perhaps it would have been better if they had kept the 10-foot barrier in place on Sunday (it was gone yesterday). If you want to see 35 people scatter during a set, throwing slimy, wriggling worms at them will do the trick.
Total Fucking Destruction – I hadn’t heard much of them before, but I enjoyed their set. I snuck up into the balcony and was able to watch Rich Hoak’s Phil Collins routine from a really great perch.
AxCx – Not exactly my cup of tea, but they were decent. Very very drunk, but decent.
Goreaphobia – I have a longstanding affinity for these guys and it was really fun to see them play songs from their early 7 inch that I got when I was 16 or so. The new material was promising and if the record is anything like their live show, they'll get a lot of attention. They sounded much tighter than I remembered them. Guitarist Alex Bouks is something special for sure. Such a shame that this band was on hiatus for 15 years. Coulda been...
Master – These guys were a revelation. I have some of their studio material and it is good meat-and-potatoes death metal, but they are a whole other animal live. Really outstanding performance. Again, Alex Bouks was amazing (he's in both bands) in an entirely different way than he was just 30 minutes earlier with Gorephobia. The bassist/singer Paul Speckmann is a phenomenal performer. Kinda reminds me of Lemmy.
Kvlt ov Azazel – I enjoyed their performance quite a bit. Not being a black metal guy, I have to say they were much better than I expected. When it comes to black metal, this is more my speed – they have an aggressive, more structured sound, rather than either the ethereal free noise that I usually associate with the genre. An interesting footnote – they played the song you posted recently, “Storm the Gates” – and said that it was the first time it had ever been played live.
Man, so jealous you got to see Dreaming Dead live. Am loving their record, and owe this very blog for turning me onto them!
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