Piranha—the debt to Jaws is obvious, and acknowledged at the beginning with someone playing the Jaws video game on screen, but this is like what if the first half of Jaws were the whole movie? So instead of a lengthy hunt sequence, we just have more and more people put in the path of the swarming genetically enhanced Piranhas, and this movie has the courage to put literally anyone in danger and kill them. Packed with great character actors like Keenan Wynn and Dick Miller, and featuring a movie-stealing performance from Paul Bartel as an evil camp director. Absolutely top-notch, with script co-written by John Sayles and direction from Joe Dante.

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein— A re-watch, but this is a stone classic. Not just Frankenstein, but also Dracula and the Wolf Man are on board, and Abbot and Costello are very funny. It’s fun to watch this and see how Scooby-Doo and pretty much every other horror comedy took cues from this. Farcical and very funny!

Abbot and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde— A strange movie in that it’s really mostly a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story (featuring Boris Karloff!) with Abbot and Costello on board for comic relief including one fantastic sequence where Costello is transformed into…well, I won’t spoil it. Not as funny as Meet Frankenstein, but still an entertaining movie!

Grizzly II: Revenge—Of course, countless movies feature disposable horny teens who die in the first five minutes of the movie, but how many movies have the crazy good fortune to cast future stars in those roles? Just this one, apparently, with George Clooney, Laura Dern, and Charlie Sheen being horny and dying early. Someone clearly shot a new opening to give these three top billing in the credits, and it’s fun to watch their inevitable deaths. Sadly, the movie goes rapidly downhill after this, and even the fantastically and possibly unintentionally comic performance of John Rhys-Davies as some kind of 19th century French Canadian trapper inexplicably roaming a National Park in 1982, complete with fringed jacket, can’t save it. Didn’t finish.

Zombeavers— I love when a movie understands the assignment. If you’re turning on a movie about horny college students being attacked by ravenous undead beavers, you have certain expectations. I’m happy to report that they are all met. You want laughs? Horrible creature effects? Gore? This movie has you covered. Also wonderful comic sequence featuring Bill Burr and John Mayer to open the movie/kick off the zombie beaver outbreak. An hour and seventeen minutes very well spent.

#review #horror #movie

Your mileage may vary. I know a lot of people are fed up with found footage, and I have some thoughts on why that might be in my review of

V/H/S Beyond. This is the, I dunno, forty-eleventh entry in this series, I really like horror anthologies as well as found footage, so I always watch them. This is a solid entry in the series, though I was disappointed that there was no satisfying crossovers between the segments as there were in V/H/S 94 and V/H/S 85. They’ve done away with the gimmick that all the segments are shot on VHS, which is a good move because who cares. Here only the frame story features VHS footage. And here, as in most entries, the frame story feels unnecessary and unsatisfying.

Every segment is well done, but here’s the problem. There is a found footage formula, which goes like this: people go investigate a thing. The thing is way worse/scarier than they anticipated. Things get worse until everybody dies. You can deviate from this formula, as many segments in the V/H/S series have, but here we get the same thing in 4 out of the 5 main segments, so that by the end, I was just kind of tired of the whole thing. “Live and Let Dive,” about a birthday skydiving trip gone horribly wrong, is probably the best segment, though “Dream Girl” was pretty good too. Each segment had some good, scary images, but the formula wore very thin for me by the end.

WNUF Halloween Special is another formulaic found footage film, but this one takes the form of a local TV reporter going to a haunted house in 1987. The movie is peppered with a TON of incredibly authentic 80’s-style TV ads, which cuts two ways—on the one hand, the many ads break up any suspense that the main plot is building, but on the other hand, they ad to the immersive feeling. I really felt like I was watching a recording of an 80’s TV broadcast. Paul Fahrenkopf gives a fantastic performance as the cynical, world-weary reporter who is trying to simultaneously sell and mock the proceedings. There are some laugh out loud funny moments in this movie, and I found the end both surprising and satisfying. In terms of both its format and sensibility, this is unlike pretty much any other movie out there. I recommend it!

Both movies are on Shudder.

#review #movie #horror #shudder

Let’s start with the cast—Liev Schreiber, Nicole Kidman, Dakota Fanning, and Eve Hewson, whose acting career almost certainly has nothing to do with her being Bono’s kid, all give excellent performances. Donna Lynne Champlin nearly steals the series in a supporting role as the mainland detective sent to Nantucket to investigate a murder.

The mystery resolves in satisfying fashion, and some of the character development is skillfully done. While Liev and Nicole’s three boys are underwritten and two-dimensional (poor Billy Howle tries his best to instill his character with an arc that the writers didn’t provide), the women are all complicated and have interesting arcs.

And yet I have some issues.

Also there was some stuff I didn’t love about the show. (badump-BUM!)

A lot of this involves the last episode, so I’d recommend skipping the rest if you haven’t watched the show yet. (tl;dr— flawed but definitely compelling and worth watching).

First, the cliche of the humble, hardworking cops just trying to get to the bottom of the mystery grated on me. Especially because one detective is supposed to be from the Massachusetts State Police, which recent events have revealed to be an incredibly corrupt, incompetent agency.

But okay, I guess I can overlook that. There are shows with elves in them, and those aren’t real either.

But there’s a weird tonal shift in the last episode. What seemed to be a dark drama with moments of comic relief for five episodes is revealed to be a dark comedy. I just found this kind of jarring. And the stuff with Greer was, in my opinion, cheesy. There are plenty of icy WASP matriarchs out there whose iciness cannot be explained by the fact that they’re hiding their past as a sex worker, and to my mind, it’s more interesting to figure out how someone became a terrible person without having a Dickensian backstory.

Also, the big resolution of the story seems to be Greer self-actualizing as an honest person, but, like, that wasn’t really the conflict in the story. And honestly, every character but one who was horrible in the show gets a happy ending, which I found displeasing. We spent five episodes hating these people and we’re supposed to be glad that the murder of a guest helped them to lead authentic lives? Blecch!

Finally, the “cast in a dance number” opening credits was done first and better in Peacemaker.

#review #tv

But for me, the fact that the movie was as interested in the family stuff as it was in the satire kind of blunted the effect of the satire. I am a white person, and this satirical movie about racism did not make me the least bit uncomfortable, which seems like a sign of failure for a satire. Honestly, I would have preferred this movie focus on Monk trying to become less of an asshole and just left the book stuff out altogether.

But I found this movie problematic in a couple of ways. I can’t talk about this without spoiling big chunks of the movie, so if you haven’t seen it, stop here! I leave you with the thought that this is an incredibly well-acted, ambitious, somewhat over-long and thought-provoking movie that didn’t ultimately work for me. Okay, on to the spoilers!

Man, I hate a meta ending, especially since it seems to punish the viewer for getting invested in the family story. But since the ending suggests that Monk’s movie is going to be pandering to white people, I think it’s worth investigating the ways in which this movie panders, either consciously or unconsciously, to a white audience.

Let’s start with the low stakes—there are certainly life or death issues in this movie, but whether Monk’s retelling of a Greek tragedy (or maybe comedy? I don’t remember) is going to sell just isn’t one. A big theme in the movie is that there’s just not enough representation of wealthy black professionals. Which, okay, yes, I believe that, though casting Max from Living Single as the love interest kind of reminds us that this is an oversimplification. (She played a lawyer on that show! In the 90’s! You could look it up! Or watch it! Funny show!) But I guess I feel like given that racism actually kills people in the United States of America, Monk’s plight never seems urgent.

But, more importantly, and I don’t know how writer/director Cord Jefferson feels about this, but WOW does this movie hate poor black people. Which is, of course, comforting to a white audience! See, it’s okay if you look down on Black Vernacular English because Black people do too! Sick of hearing about Black men being murdered by police? It’s okay! Black people are too! Don’t let it trouble your conscience! Someone in the movie, I think it’s Issa Rae’s character, says, “white people don’t want the truth; they want absolution.” And that’s exactly what this movie gives us. The protagonist’s classist hatred of poor Black people absolves white people of any guilt they might feel about their own racist hatred of poor Black people.

And now let’s talk about the homophobia for a minute, shall we? We’re clearly supposed to side with Cliff when he’s rejected by his mom, okay, but there are three gay characters in this movie (and two anonymous twinks). One is a selfish, oversexed, coked-out party animal, and the other are classic queer-coded villains whose gayness is essential to their villainy. In other words, nobody gay in this movie is just a regular person, and the characters’ problematic behaviors and attitudes are inextricably linked to their gayness.

#review #movie

First of all, the performances are great: David Dastmalchian is both charming and slightly off-putting as the host, Ian Bliss is a delight as an arrogant, showboating magician-turned-professional skeptic, Rhys Auteri plays the long-suffering sidekick with just the perfect amount of supressed rage, and Ingrid Torellis is fantastic as Lilly, which is good because the entire movie depends on her performance.

It just makes such a difference when everyone in a horror movie can act. No weak links in this cast. The script is good too—not just another version of something we’ve seen a million times, but a pretty fresh twist on both found footage and demonic possession. You know what else I liked? The filmmakers drop some information early on, and I was pretty sure this was going to come out later in the movie as a Big Reveal, but, in fact, they trusted that their audience had seen enough horror movies to draw their own conclusions, and it wasn’t necessary to construct a big reveal on those points! I cannot stress enough how rare this is.

Also good—the movie captures the 70’s atmosphere perfectly, in everything from the look and feel to the show to the creepy kid, which was a strong trope in 70’s horror cinema. So far so good, and I enjoyed watching it.

I do of course have 2 quibbles. The first involves spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid them.

Okay, so Carmichael Haig has a rational explanation for everything, but then his rational explanation for the…initial event with Lilly is involuntary mass hypnosis, which he then demonstrates? Nah. Not buying it. I mean, I could buy it from another movie, but it seemed to violate the movie’s internal logic and therefore seemed like a cheesy development.

And, perhaps more importantly, the filmmakers made their own deal with the devil by using AI-generated, or, more simply, plagiarized, images on some of the “more to come” and “be right back” title cards that come up on commercial breaks. I mean, the title cards did help build the 70’s atmosphere (much as the non-AI-generated ones on Hanging With Dr. Z do), but why involve the Automated Plagiarism Machine on something a human graphic designer could do easily? It’s not like this was a low-budget production, by horror standards. Dumb, shitty decision. I knew this going in to the movie and so obviously didn’t boycott it as a result, but it’s actually mystifying to me why they did this unless it was simply to get us used to machine-plagiarized art in movies so they can phase out real artists in the future.

#review #movie #horror #shudder

LC/50, I Don’t Like Me Either— The band kicks out the old school hardcore jams, and vocalist Teresa Ortega elevates the whole affair with her absolutely amazing rock and roll voice. Bonus (from my perspective): recorded live. I think rock and roll should be recorded live, either in the studio or in front of an audience, to capture the energy of a performance. Bands in studios often seem to get obsessive about making sure everyone puts in a perfectly clean performance and so release these perfectly performed but kind of inert studio recordings. Not the case here! Not that this is sloppy in any way—but it just feels energetic in a way a lot of recordings don’t.

Upchuck, Bite The Hand That Feeds— I’ve been following this punk band from Atlanta for a while, and this record finds them branching out a little bit musically and sounding better than ever, and absolutely kicking ass. Absolutely no shortage of energy here, and there’s also melody, some kickass guitar licks, and one inexplicable but irresistable Pixies pastiche. Vocalist KT rocks incredibly hard, as does the entire band.

The Chelsea Curve, All The Things— Folks who went to shows in Boston in the 90’s may recall Miles Dethmuffin, whose bassist Linda Pardee fronts this power pop trio providing hummable melodies, irresistible hooks, and witty lyrics. What the hell else do you want from power pop?

Coco & The Hitmen, Coco & The Hitmen— Bought this on impulse—no recommendation or anything. I just came across their page last Bandcamp Friday and saw the band photo with the guys in horizontal striped shirts looking like the Rentacrowd-Era Len Price 3, saw it described as “garage pop,” and hit the buy button. Coco’s got a great alto voice, the backing vocals are great, and, best of all from my perspective, the recording sounds kind of terrible. I mean this as a compliment—it sounds much closer to something my friends used to record on their crappy little 4-track recorders than to a slick studio production. The spare, no-frills sound fits the music perfectly.(Bonus: great cover of Frida’s classic “Something Going On”.)

Couch Slut, You Could Do it Tonight. All art forms offer different pleasures, so let me just say first of all that these songs are not particularly melodic, and though it’s usually classed as metal because the songs have bass-heavy doom metal-esque grooves, there are no deedly-deedly guitar solos. And most tracks feature vocalist Megan Osztrosits screaming. And I love this album. People who make heavy extreme music tend to be unhappy about the world and possibly their lives, but metal usually approaches this stuff through metaphor—hence all the Satan stuff (and occasional Lovecraft and/or folk horror stuff.). No metaphor here. The songs are about being in dangerous, drug and booze fueled situations with the threat or reality of rape ever present, and Megan Osztrosits is pissed. Actually that doesn’t do it justice: she’s enraged. And women are usually socialized not to express rage, even in their art, so this, sixty years into rock and roll, feels transgressive in a way hardly any other rock-based music does these days. It’s not an easy listen, by any means—it’s not gonna be background music, and it’s not something (like a lot of metal) where you can enjoy the grooves and riffs and disregard the vocals. This album both demands and rewards your attention. I hesitate to say any work of art is important because a lot of different works of art can be important to an individual, but not that many are important to a culture. I think this is one of those. Uncompromising and powerful, and if you’re comfortable with the extreme metal idiom (which, again, this doesn’t quite fit into but is definitely adjacent to), you should pick it up.

#music #review

It’s a very fun movie—not as good as the best of the V/H/S movies, but far, far better than the worst of the V/H/S movies.

The frame story, The Traveler, is pretty weak stuff despite Efran Ramirez’s excellent performance. The frame story is supposed to tie the other segments together, but in this case, it’s mostly Ramirez being interrogated by police and telling them stories that are completely unrelated to the stuff he’s trying to convince them of.

The first story, Tambien Lo Vi, is an unsettling tale of how a guy uses a Rubik’s Cube algorithm to open a portal to the land of the dead. It’s creepy and effective and Demian Saloman turns in a great performance as the unhinged cube solver.

The next, El Vampiro, was my favorite. It definitely hits the comedy harder than the horror, but I don’t mind that in a horror comedy as long as it’s actually funny. There’s one bit in particular involving vampiric hypnosis that goes on way too long and therefore goes through that cycle where it’s funny and then not funny and then suddenly funnier because it just doesn’t stop. Anyway, I’m always on board for bumbling vampires, and the end of this was actually quite sweet without being treacly or manipulative.

In Nahuales, a guy…I dunno, gets captured by some unded pre-Aztec tribe or something? Atmosphere was good, but there wasn’t really all that much of a story. (In fairness to the filmmakers, I should point out that this is the point in the movie at which the edible kicked in, so I may have missed subtleties or not-so-subtleties.)

The Hammer of Zanzibar was another comedic segment that…I mean, either you find dildos inherently hilarious or you don’t. I count myself in the former category, so I enjoyed this. I’ve seen complaints of this segment being homophobic, but I, a straight white guy and therefore the final arbiter of what is and is not offensive, did not read it that way. (spoiler incoming!) To me, the joke of the flashback story wasn’t that the guy was gay—it was that we think he’s going to tell a harrowing story of fighting a demon, but he winds up seriously oversharing about his sex life. Anyway, your mileage may vary, of course.

And then we get the wrapup of The Traveler, which is fun, but…well, like I said, the whole story was pretty meh.

Overall a movie I would definitely recommend to horror fans, especially those who want to see more diversity in the genre.

Honestly, horror from different perspectives and cultures is, for me, a small hopeful light in the darkness of….well, you know, everything. It reminds us of our shared humanity in a real and visceral way! What’s not to love?!

#review #horror #shudder

The setting is the titular boarding school for incorrigibles, nestled on a mountain peak atop sheer rock walls. Oh yeah, there’s a monastery there too. The school is openly abusive—students are routinely sent to “the cooler,” a literal dungeon open to the outside air, as punishment, and then have to recite a creepy thing about how they deserved their punishment in front of the entire student body. In an early episode, a girl has her head shaved for disobedience (and then apparently decides she’s gonna make it work for her, as she continues to rock the buzz cut for at least three months of story time. Go Paz!).

But students (and some staff) soon find that there’s something even more sinister going on at the school than the abuse everybody knows about. Does it have to do with the ancient cult that used to meet on this site? Or the sinister guy who doesn’t work at the school but seems to be in charge of it somehow whose daughter has amnesia? Or the monks who may or may not be what they seem? The show does a wonderful job of keeping us off balance, as the students try to figure out exactly what the hell is going on while searching for missing comrades and trying to dodge an apparent serial killer.

Now, let’s be completely clear—there’s a lot that is preposterous about this show, and you have to be willing to put that stuff aside. Stuff like, “wow, these parents really don’t seem to care that multiple murders have taken place on this campus, huh?” or '“you know, for a place with such draconian discipline, it’s a bit weird that the students are essentially unsupervised and have no trouble being places they’re not supposed to be pretty much any time at all.”

Also, secondary characters tend to kind of disappear a lot, waved away with a “yeah, they left the school.” And there’s a significant departure after season 2 that never fully makes sense.

BUT—literally every mystery in the show, of which there are many, is ultimately resolved in satisfying fashion. Every single one! I’m so used to shows halfassing the ending or just hoping we’d forget about part of the mystery that it was incredibly satisfying to have every single thing wrapped up satisfactorily by the end.

If you’re squeamish about gore, there are five or six moments per season that you’ll want to avoid. But if you think a show about plucky kids trying to fight against overwhelming odds (while of course still negotiating high school hookups, because priorities!) in a spooky setting might be for you, you’re probably right!

#review #tv

I, like everyone else alive at the time, grew to loathe that song to my very core because it was everywhere all the time. I’ve tried to explain this phenomenon to my kids—how it used to be that a song was just inescapable for months at a time. They nod politely, but they can’t fully understand. BTW, this is a thing that has definitely changed for the better in our popular culture.

But enough time has passed, and I thought the sight of big stars being starstruck by all the other big stars in the room would be fun, and so it was! Also entertaining was Lionel Richie’s tale of trying to write the song with Michael Jackson because Stevie Wonder wouldn’t call him back, and the two of them just kind of noodling around until Quincy Jones showed up and demanded a song, and then banging it out in no time.

The song itself, is, of course, horrible. Just the worst kind of maudlin kitsch. Bruce Springsteen, in present-day interviews, alludes to this very tactfully and kind of says basically it was about a moment and a feeling rather than creating a timeless musical masterpiece.

But then there’s the hour-by-hour recounting of the recording session. Have you ever been to a recording session? I used to have friends in bands, and I went to a couple of recording sessions, and lemme tellya—they are tedious as fuck. The filmmakers try to instill some suspense with repeated shots of the clock—it’s 4 AM! Will they get it done? But of course we know they got it done, so seeing every little hiccup in the recording process is profoundly uninteresting. (Okay, Stevie Wonder trying to add some Swahili to the song, someone patiently explaining to him that they don’t speak Swahili in Ethiopia while Waylon Jennings walks out essentially saying he’s too racist to sing Swahili is kind of funny.)

So the movie should probably have been 60 minutes rather than 90. Or, perhaps they should have devoted the last 30 minutes to the aftermath. But that’s a very different story. More on that below.

As a teen, it was challenging to me to see artists I really liked and respected standing next to and performing with artists I really hated. Too often (especially in the teen years), music fandom devolves into cliquishness. I have to hate that band because some popular kid likes them. Or they’re not cool, or whatever. (and props to Little Steven, who, a year or so later, assembled a lineup of musicians that was cool top to bottom AND made a song that still slaps in the process. “Sun City,” if you’re playing at home. )

But this song and this video celebrate music as a force that, as Madonna said, makes the people come together. Too bad the song is such a treacle fest.

And then there’s the aftermath. And I get why this doesn’t make the cut of the movie because it’s not the story they’re trying to tell, but there is a title card celebrating how much money the song and the organization made. Which, okay, but what happened to the money?

You can read up on the Live Aid fiasco here—it seems the USA for Africa money might have been bundled with that, but I’m not sure. But if you don’t want to click through, the short version is this: in the modern world, famines don’t just happen. They are almost always caused by war and colonialism. In this case, the civil war in Ethiopia. Those kids starving on TV were starving because the government napalmed their farms, not because of some natural disaster.

So when you roll up to the guy who’s been napalming the farms and go, “hey, here’s a bunch of money!” it turns out he doesn’t spend it on feeding those people because he wants them to starve.

Oops.

So, in the end, it turns out a bunch of rich people with good intentions and a lot of money can’t actually save the world. It turns out that blundering into complex problems you don’t understand is not actually the best way to help.

But that would be a pretty depressing coda to a mostly upbeat movie. Still, if you’re going to assert that this wasn’t just a bunch of people making a song but An Important Moment, I think you owe it to your viewers to be honest.

I lived through the era of all these benefit songs and concerts, and it was thrilling. They gave me hope, even though I thought, correctly, that We Are The World is a fucking terrible song. But I think the important part wasn’t the money they raised, which mostly made things worse, but the fact that they demonstrated art’s power to break down barriers that I thought were rock solid at the time. I got a similar giddy thrill when Sting made an album with Shaggy. Or when Alison Krauss and Robert Plant got together. Art is powerful! You can make music with someone who does something very different from you, and maybe something really cool and different will result! There’s your upbeat coda.

#review

I grew up listening to punk, which is sort of metal-adjacent, but the mainstream conquered punk in 1991, whereas the more extreme versions of metal remain pretty stubbornly un-commercial. I mean, I assume some of these bands make a living making their art, but nobody’s getting rich making black metal.

I’m drawn to art that gathers in misfits, as punk did when I was a kid, and so I have been slowly working my way into metal. I like the theatricality and the musicianship, but I’d still consider myself an outsider to the scene. (I mean, also I’m old as fuck, so). So this is pretty much going to be an outsider’s view of a metal show. Which means I don’t know all the proper names of the sub-sub-sub genres, for one thing, so don’t yell at me about that. Okay, off we go!

Necrofier opened the show. They kind of embodied the contradictions in extreme metal—it’s both rebellious and extremely conventional. (This happened in hardcore punk too). If you look at a lot of metal band photos, they’re all pretty much the same—guys with long hair and/or beards and big arms wearing black with their arms folded looking slightly menacingly at the camera. And so Necrofier was definitely cut from that cloth. The vibe was extremely macho. I know nothing about the band’s politics, but the aesthetic and vibes were giving fascism. That is to say, it was a performance that felt like it was about masculinity, power and domination. The guitarist yelled at the crowd to form a pit, and there was some halfhearted moshing going on, but overall they didn’t seem to be a big crowd favorite. And it was just all so SERIOUS. I had the thought while watching them that metal is just punk with its sense of humor removed. And then I remembered that’s actually Fugazi.

Next came Worm. Or possibly WORM. In any case, this band was cool. I think the subgenre is doom, or, as I think of it “sounds like Sabbath.” The aesthetics were VERY different here. The singer, who goes by the name of Phantom Slaughter, was a skinny guy in dark glasses with white corpsepaint and frowny lipstick. It was giving metal Joey Ramone. Or possibly Stiv Bator. The guitarist was wearing a vest, puffy shirt, and a cape. He may have had vampire fangs in—I was too far back to see. But, in any case, Slaughter is a mesmerizing performer, the grooves were slow and sludgy, and the aesthetic hit what is the sweet spot of metal for me, which is to say, both a joke and not a joke. Like, there’s a guy in a vampire cape—it’s ridiculous. And yet it’s played totally straight. Anyway, I dug this band, and while I was checking the time 15 minutes into Necrofier’s set, I wished Worm had gone on longer. I also wished I’d been able to hear the guitars, but the sound guy was apparently so dedicated to turning the bass up to “bowel shaking” levels that the guitars were lost in the mix. It’s a testament to the quality of the performance that I wanted more anyway.

And then—Devil Master. Now, this may be in part because they are sort of a punk/metal band, and so I’m just more comfortable in this idiom, but this was the highlight of the night for me. One guy in corpsepaint and a cape (again, it’s a joke, and also not), and the other guys looking pretty normal (well, the singer/bassist had improbably long hair that obscured his face for most of the performance, but still.). They rocked the fuck out, and nobody had to yell at the kids (it was an all-ages show) to form a mosh pit. It broke out spontaneously. There was a big run to their merch table at the end, which I think shows that people were impressed with the performance. They played their album front to back and left. I recommend the album, Ecstasies of Neverending Night, and the songs are even better live.

Finally Hulder took to the stage. Hulder is a one-woman band in the studio, but here she was backed by a bunch of guys as she delivered traditional black metal, complete with those gutteral, growling vocals. I dug this, because by using this traditionally ultra-masculine style, she’s undermining the misogyny and machismo that taints a lot of metal. One of the guys in her band was even bald, which I believe is black metal heresy. But I guess the sound guy really hated her because, once again, the guitars were inaudible as the bass and kickdrums dominated the mix. Now look. I liked being able to feel the music, but one of the things that’s interesting to me about metal is the interplay between the heavy drums and bass and the extremely treble-y lead guitar lines. So we lost basically half the music in this mix. And also Hulder didn’t bring much to the table, stage-presence wise. I like that she was dressed and corpse-painted in a way that was very un-sexualized—it was giving angry witch, or possibly kid from The Ring all grown up—but she didn’t give us much in the way of performance apart from a few headbanging, hair-flying moments. (Her bassist did the same and got his hair momentarily caught in the sprinkler, which was amusing). Her new album is good, and I think I would have enjoyed the performance much more if the sound had been competently mixed.

Some general observations: the crowd was, as you might expect, VERY white. What you might not expect was that there were a lot of women in the audience. Maybe this is due to Hulder, but either way, apart from Necrofier, there just wasn’t a lot of metal-bro energy in the audience, which I liked. It was a relaxed, friendly, and welcoming crowd. A couple of times I bumped into people, or they bumped into me, and it was always, “whoa, sorry!” I have certainly been at concerts where an accidental bump would get you a glare at best and a threat at worst, and you might think a metal show would be like that, but it totally wasn’t.

Here’s something weird, which I guess is a convention of this kind of music? No stage banter. Well, one sentence was spoken to the audience the entire night: “We’re Necrofier from Texas.” (The guy who tried to order the kids to mosh was doing it off-mic.) No intros, nothing between songs, no “okay, we got one more for you, you’ve been a great audience, good night.” This was especially weird at the end of a set. The song would end, and the band would walk off stage, and we’d all kind of look at each other and go “Hmm. I guess the set’s over, then.”

Also, no smiles allowed, apparently. There were plenty of smiles among the crowd—in fact, there was a pretty stark contrast between the gleeful smiles of the kids in the pit and the humorless miens of the performers. Now, as I mentioned, there was humor, certainly—you just can’t wear a cape in total seriousness—but nobody on stage gave any indication that they were having fun. I guess this is part of the culture, but since I’m not used to this culture, it felt a little odd to me. I’m used to feeling like live music is a communal experience including musicians and fans, but here it felt more like the fans were having a communal experience that the bands were providing the soundtrack for.

So, in the end, for 25 bucks I got to see two bands I really enjoyed and two bands I enjoyed somewhat less. Definitely a bargain! This tour has upcoming stops in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Lawrence KS, and Denver. Definitely worth the price of admission!

#review #music #metal #concert