Traffic was Defcon Go-Fuck-Yourself on the way to New York, but I had anticipated such things and still made it in plenty of time for a bit of hanging out ahead of the start of the first Ode to Doom of 2020 at Arlene’s Grocery in Manhattan. This site has been involved in presenting these shows for over three years now, but I’ve been to exactly two of them — a source of shame, but one of so many it just kind of blends in with the rest — and that’s counting this one. Still, it’s a familial vibe — which is one more reason to salute the work put in over the aforementioned years by Claudia Crespo — and that kind of thing is hard to beat, even if you have to sit for a while on the way there. I streamed PBS Newshour on my phone in the car. We do what we have to do to get by.

Anxiety earlier in the day had been brutal, but I was glad to have left the house even before the gig started and that only of course became more the case once Dutchguts went on, playing ahead of a four-band bill that was front-to-back righteous, with Sigils, The Druids and Eternal Black rounding out as they celebrated drummer and best-dude-ever Joe Wood‘s birthday. Was there singing? Yes. There was.

First band was on a little after 7:30PM, and the night went thusly:

Dutchguts

Oh, I do enjoy a bit of them Dutchguts. Not the least because they’re from my home area in the northern end of my beloved Garden State, but because they’re so dead-on in sludge fuckall. They take the stage, almost say hi, and rip into killer, volatile and pummeling sludge riffs one after another, with an abandon befitting a band who are on the road 15o days a year and I’ve seen them play empty rooms, filling rooms like this one was or even their own space at The Meatlocker in Montclair, and the result is consistently awesome. At any moment, the whole thing might fall apart, and if it does, fuck it. It hasn’t yet, at least not that I’ve seen, but hell, one more reason to keep showing up. Seems like they’re about due for an LP — or at least a 27-minute half-punk-songs collection of feedback and riffs they press to a 12″ and call an LP — but hell if I know if they have anything in the works or not. They are, in the meantime, convincingly stoned and convincingly disaffected in equal measure, and that’s not easy to pull off amid such rampant cynicism. Punk rock. Punk rock. Plus destruction.

Sigils

Good band. As it was my first time seeing New York’s own Sigils live, and as I very much enjoyed their 2019 debut, You Built the Altar You Lit the Leaves (review here), they were probably the band I was most looking forward to catching at the show. No disappointment. As one might expect, they were somewhat rawer on stage than on record — because duh; also they were people — but as a part of that, some of what just came across on the LP as tonal and effects wash came through a little bit clearer in the double-guitar dynamic. Add to that vocals with, as the request was made, as much reverb as possible and then more reverb, and the ambience factor was still high, but that didn’t necessarily take away from the impact either. They’re a kind-of-newer-ish band, and the album bore that out as well in its sound and style, but on stage they were able to bring the material across not just convincingly, but with a sense of purpose underscoring the emotionalism of the tracks in question. New York has a decent amount of Heavy at this point — not as much as a decade ago, but still —  but not a lot of it touches on psychedelic crush in the manner of Sigils, and one hopes they continue to stand out in that regard as they progress, which, given their sound live and recorded, they will actively work to do. Or, to put it another way: Good band. They played a short set, but I’ll take it.

The Druids

Last seen at Maryland Doom Fest 2019 (review here), the D.C.-area riffers brought a bit of the Chesapeake to Ode to Doom‘s otherwise NYC Metro focus, and I don’t just mean they blew a guitar head, though that also happened. And early in the set, too. Kind of rough. They continued on, however, with bass and drums rolling on in extra-sludgy fashion as a Sunn amp came out to replace the Marshall that would seem to have bit it. The lone guitar — there were two at MDDF — kicked back in just in time for a solo, so that was kind of a fun way to arrive, and The Druids were off and lumbering from there. Some of the psychedelic aspects of their sound seemed to have dissipated in comparison to what I remember of them from last summer, but their earlier-2019 debut, Totem (review here), was pulling in any number of directions, so where they end up is still anyone’s best guess. My own would be useless, I’m sure. Still, heavy edge and a band in development. The absence of Gary Isom on drums was notable, but Ben “Vang Ghazi” Blanton (ex-VOG, ex-Foehammer, Ambition Burning) has a pedigree of his own and certainly had no trouble holding down the weightiest of their grooves, significant as they were. Despite the technical troubles, I came out of their set more intrigued, not less, to find out where they’re going with their sound.

Eternal Black

I don’t think I have a run for Manhattan city council in my bones, but if I did, I can hardly imagine a better platform than renaming one of these streets after Eternal Black‘s Joe Wood. Or better yet, all of Long Island. Joe Wood Island. Property values would skyrocket. On the day of his birth, Wood anchored the weighted and pro-shop-delivered doom crunch of Ken Wohlrob‘s guitar and Hal Miller‘s bass, emphasizing the point that was made so effectively on their second album, Slow Burn Suicide (review here), self-released last year. I have been wondering ever since I first heard those songs just how direct their intent to bring in noise and NY hardcore vibes has been, and as Wohlrob has been doubling in End of Hope, the answer would seem to be pretty damn intentional. and Eternal Black showed it too in the two new songs they played, “A Million Ways to Die” and “River Runs Eternally Red” — not to be confused with the Life of Agony song/album — though the latter was a riffer all the way. They are nonetheless a doom band, and they groove accordingly. Watching them, it works though because it’s a mesh rather than a competition of influences in their sound, and the nod-with-aggro-edge is more New York than any deli you could ever hope to name, and they closed with a roughed-up take on “Stained Eyes on a Setting Sun” from their first album, 2017’s Bleed the Days (review here), as if to prove it. As a human being, I hope Joe Wood had a great birthday. I know Eternal Black certainly made my night, fitting well in the hometown heroes role as they were.

—

The ride back to my ancestral compound was simple enough. Some flashing lights, some hit the brakes. No deer in the road, so mark it a Jersey win, and it wasn’t long before my eyes were sagging and my brain was coming out through my runny nose. Fair enough. I could go on a rant about the integrity of an event like this, the obvious passion driving it and the community it’s built, or even the need for a Manhattan underground to exist now more than ever, but hell’s bells, just show up to the next Ode and see for yourself. No one believes anything they read on the internet anyway, and the shows will be their own best argument. Good bands, good friends, good times. Nights like these you remember.

Thanks for reading.

Teaneck, huh? On a Thursday? Yeah, alright. I’ll waddle down and check that out. One night ahead of starting their tour with Corrosion of Conformity, New Orleans sludgemasters Crowbar and Ohio fuzzy soul-lifters Lo-Pan made a stop at Debonair Music Hall — the former Mexicali Blues — in the suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey, with local modern sludgers Dutchguts opening. It doesn’t feel like a stretch to me to say heavy shows don’t happen every day in North Jersey. And if you’re not up on geography, that’s because right on the other side of that bridge and/or tunnel is New York City, which is where shows do happen every day and are generally guaranteed to draw more people. Seeing a band like Crowbar — or even Lo-Pan, for whom this was their second Jersey show — without having to cross the Hudson River at rush hour? The very least I could do would be to show up. So I did that.

Incidentally and maybe less surprising given their 30-plus-year history, it wasn’t Crowbar‘s first North Jersey show. They played a place called Obsessions in Randolph circa ’93 that’s long since gone, which I remember not because I was there — I was 12 — but from graffiti on the wall in the tiny room that was their “backstage” area. Whether or not they returned to the area between the two gigs, I couldn’t say.

They’d headline the early night, with Lo-Pan playing the middle of the three slots and Dutchguts kicking off the proceedings at 7:45PM sharp. The Debonair Music Hall at that point could not be accused of being overly populated, but there were several in the crowd who very clearly knew the four-piece, likely from the DIY scene they’ve built up around the Meatlocker basement venue in Montclair — though as I recall, someone in the band was local enough to me to know the bar Hoover’s on Rt. 53 when the subject came up years ago. Their take on sludge is more brash and less metal than Crowbar‘s, and it had clearly been a while since I last saw them. Like the better part of a decade, since I seemed to remember them as kids. Their roots were the same — big Eyehategod influence, some Converge, some other dark hardcore punk, plenty of tonal heft, and so on — but their delivery was 10 years wiser, more experienced and vicious.

Dutchguts will open for Eyehategod in Jersey City in September and that feels about right in terms of fit. Though their most recent outing is a 2017 split with Chained to the Dead (discussed here), they’ve done a fair amount of touring, including last month, and have something of a reputation that precedes them. I thought they were cool. After 10 years though, it might be time to put out an album if you’re ever going to. I’ll admit a 7″-only attitude is pretty punk, but still. A compilation, maybe?

How I found out about this show in the first place was hearing it from the guys in Lo-Pan last month before their set at Maryland Doom Fest 2019 (review here), and frankly, even with Crowbar on top of the bill, I was thinking of it as “the Lo-Pan show” in my head. This site is presenting their upcoming Fall European tour with Steak and Elephant Tree (dates here), and I knew from their Maryland set that they’d be playing mostly if not entirely material from their new album, Subtle (review here), which came out through Aqualamb in May. That indeed was the case, and though there was no “Ten Days” this time, having “Everything Burns,” “Law & the Swarm” and “Khan!” in the setlist gave Subtle its due, along with the near-mandatory “Ascension Day,” “Savage Heart” and “Sage.” I’ll be curious to hear how the set changes when they come back through Jersey (further south) with Crowbar and C.O.C. in just about one month.

About that: this was pretty much a warm-up show for them, as well as for Crowbar. The tour with C.O.C. headlining starts in Poughkeepsie at The Chance, and I guess they had occasion to make the show happen — picking up a bus in the Meadowlands, perhaps? — and it was a way to give them a leg-up on getting into the groove of the next month to come. Hey, I’ll take it however it comes, but the first night of a tour is always a specious time to see a band. They’re getting their feet under them. They’re tired from a long day of travel. They’re looking ahead to the weeks to come. They’ve not yet developed every tour’s inevitable thousand-yard-stare, locked-in, almost-traumatized sense of I-live-23-hours-to-play-for-one that they will have, say, after five or so nights of gigs in a row. Lo-Pan held it down, and so did Crowbar, but mostly that means that when they circle back, they’ll be that much more on fire.

Nonetheless, one appreciates seeing bands like this the way one appreciates the breaking of a humid Jersey heatwave. Pro-shop, get-on-stage-and-go professionalism is a marker of who a band are as players and a unit and Crowbar are unmistakable even besides that. Guitarist/vocalist Kirk Windstein thanked the crowd, including specifically a kid up front who couldn’t have been more than 10 if he was that — thereby, one assumes, making a fan for life — and they tore into their set with all the lumbering ferocity one could expect. This was my second time seeing them after catching the earlier leg of their tour with C.O.C. in Boston (review here), and whether it was that sold-out date or this Thursday night in Teaneck, Crowbar played their show regardless. It was great to see and of course they killed it, opening with “All I Had I Gave” and rolling “Lasting Dose” into “To Build a Mountain” early on.

It was mostly the same set from February, which is fair enough, but with “Conquering” included ahead of “Planets Collide” and “Like Broken Glass,” so I’ll go ahead and mark that a win if you don’t mind. A “pit” broke out of kids having fun during “To Build a Mountain” — that riff’ll do it — and the vibe on the whole was intimate, friendly and l-o-u-d. I wouldn’t have asked for anything more than that, if I’d felt entitled to ask in the first place.

The tour-proper will be a sight to see, with Quaker City Night Hawks and Corrosion of Conformity alongside Crowbar and Lo-Pan. This show, in addition to being my first-not-last time at Debonair Music Hall unless a piano falls on my head between now and the next one, gave me something to look forward to for August, served to remind of the strength of the local NJ underground, and took less than 35 minutes to drive home from when it was over, which was still on the relatively early end. I kind of felt like they were doing me a favor all the way around.

More pics after the jump. Thanks for reading.

Read more »

You probably won’t need me to tell you that viciousness is the order of the day on the forthcoming split between Dutchguts and Chained to the Dead. Set for issue on Sept. 1 via Horror Pain Gore Death, the release brings together some of harshest sounds my beloved Garden State of New Jersey has to offer, and both outfits have quick-as-you-please samplings of their wares on offer to prove the point below. Been a while since I heard anything out of Dutchguts, but their punker sludge remains tinged with groove and chaos in like measure, and Chained to the Dead, well, that’s some shit-raw death metal right there. Bonus points to them for having a dude named Joe Ott in the lineup who, about a million years ago used to play in a group called Ice Titan. Those guys were always a good time, I promise you. Those million years, it would seem, have done nothing to dull Mr. Ott‘s ferocity.

And so much the better. You can check out those tracks at the bottom of this post, and doing so will take a little over three minutes of your day, so you know, nothing to lose and all that. Art, info on the release, tracklisting and audio follow, courtesy of the PR wire.

Here’s to The Meatlocker:

DUTCHGUTS join forces with CHAINED TO THE DEAD for explosive “Split” CD release September 1st via Horror Pain Gore Death Productions

Horror Pain Gore Death Productions are set to release an explosive Split release between New Jersey act’s Dutchguts and Chained To The Dead, September 1st on CD and Digital formats. Below is the official description:

Horror Pain Gore Death Productions unearth a deadly split featuring two of New Jersey’s most vicious up and coming acts: Dutchguts and Chained To The Dead! First up on the chopping block is Dutchguts who hail from Montclair NJ and play Hardcore Punk/Sludge for fans of Black Sabbath, Bongzilla, Discharge, Motörhead and Sleep. Chained To The Dead reside from northern NJ and play Death Metal created from the ashes of 80’s VHS tapes… for fans of Asphyx, Blood Duster, Cannibal Corpse, Carcass, Cattle Decapitation, Demilich, Faith No More, Goatwhore, Gwar, Macabre, Pungent Stench and Suffocation.

TRACK LISTING:

Dutchguts
1. Bad Batch
2. Happy Trails To Hell
3. Snake Piss

Chained To The Dead
4. The Ballad Of The Melting Hobos
5. The Ones That Walk Away
6. Beast From The East

https://www.facebook.com/DUTCHGUTS/
https://dutchguts.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/chainedtothedead/
https://chainedtothedead.bandcamp.com/
http://www.horrorpaingoredeath.com
http://hpgd.bandcamp.com
http://www.facebook.com/horrorpaingoredeath
https://twitter.com/hpgd666

Dutchguts, “Bad Batch”

Chained to the Dead, “The Ones that Walk Away”

My plan last night was to drive down to New Brunswick to catch a house show of up-and-coming Jersey sludge bands topped off with the final gig of Massachusetts duo Olde Growth‘s most recent tour. Also on the bill were Pharaoh (not to be confused with the trad metal band from Chicago), the previously On the Radar-ized Eternal Fuzz, and Dutchguts, whom I’ve seen kicking around Jersey a couple times and who run the multi-stage basement venue The Meatlocker in Montclair — where Olde Growth played last time they came through.

Being forever in the shadow of NYC as regards actual venues — that is, the second anyone’s big enough to fill a bar, they’re not doing it here anymore — New Jersey has a long tradition of house shows. In the mid to late ’90s, it was how frantic tech metallers The Dillinger Escape Plan and numerous others first cut their teeth, and it’s been the foundation of the state’s obnoxiously/admirably persistent punk rock scene ever since. I wasn’t a part of that scene. Too young. The place where this show was held was just an old house on a wide street full of old houses. They called it The Alamo, and I walked through the side yard and around the back and knew almost immediately I was too old to be there.

I’d left work at six, dropped the dog off at home and driven, hurriedly, an hour south to go to the show. I genuinely wanted to see it. But you gotta understand, these were kids. I played a New Brunswick house show a few years back, but it’s different when you’re not actually in a band, and it was weird. I had my camera bag with me, but as the first band was getting ready to go on — the dude I asked didn’t know their name but said they had the guitar player from Sonofabitch, which didn’t help much — my choice very quickly became clear. I could stand around and be the old guy no one knows at the house show, or I could split. There wasn’t going to be any middle ground.

The year I was born, 1981, is listed as the dividing point between Generation X and the Millennials, but the reality of the situation is, I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged to one generation or another. I turn 31 later this year, and by the time I was a senior in high school, I knew the freshmen were coming from someplace completely different. Most of my youth I spent trying to hang around with people older than me. I sucked at being young. But I never really hit a point where I could relate to the perspective of those older than me either. It’s an awkward middle-ground that feels half a decade on the wrong side of either place. Born too late, born too early.

I don’t have a problem with being too old for the house show. Like I said, I sucked at being young, and so youth — inasmuch as it’s something I’ve “lost” — isn’t something I really miss. Youth had a lot of dire-seeming bullshit that I hated, and everyone treated each other like a motherfucker. But being where I was when I was, I never had a scene like the one growing now in Jersey, and the lesson I learned last night was that at least in the capacity of going to the shows and digging on these bands as they come up and get their footing creatively and in terms of performance, it’s just not going to work. I can support bands the way I do (i.e. writing), but being a part of it, being actually in it and of it, is something I’ve missed out on.

And in another three or four years, assuming they can keep it together, these bands are going to slay. Dutchguts, Pharaoh. I haven’t seen Eternal Fuzz yet, but I can only assume from what I’ve heard on the recording that the same applies. They’re young and arrogant enough to have their discovery of bands like Eyehategod be a natural outcrop of post-hardcore, and not so self-aware yet that they’ve lost their edge. I heard a report on the BBC yesterday that adolescence, that brain development, continues until the age of about 25. If they can make the most of the freedom they have — and especially doing it in an environment where they support and encourage each other, as they seem to be — then New Jersey’s heavy future is bright. I’ll look forward to hearing those records.

But there are things you can do that come with age and things you can’t, and at 30, my needs and my desires aren’t what they were even three years ago, let alone five or 10. I made my way through the house and down the small entranceway to the old basement, a pipe coming down from the already-low ceiling that I had to duck under, and watched that first band for a couple songs. Two guitars, drums, vocals, coming through Sunn heads and a shitty P.A., grooving out slow riffs like they just invented them, and just knew I was in the wrong place. I didn’t even want to take the camera out of my bag to take pictures. I didn’t want to move except to leave. So I left.

Maybe it didn’t matter. I don’t live under the delusion that wherever I go people are automatically paying attention to me, but I stood out and it made me uncomfortable. I was older, I was bigger, and if I wasn’t going to enjoy being there, what’s the point? Everything else sucks, music doesn’t. If going to shows is going to be a pain in my ass, then pretty much I’ve got nothing going for me. I didn’t see the Olde Growth dudes, and I didn’t get to catch Dutchguts, Pharaoh or Eternal Fuzz, as I wish I had, but in that place at that time, it just wasn’t going to work. Whether or not I actually was, I felt like I was intruding.

On my way out, I spoke to Rich Bukowski from Pharaoh for a bit. He was a couple years behind me (of course) at Seton Hall, and I’ve seen him around at shows ever since, so we’re friendly enough to say hey when we run into each other. I told him I envy what’s happening with these bands right now, that I wished it had been going on six years ago, and that I was going home. And then I did. The band inside was just launching into a cover of “Sister Fucker Pt. 1.” I got back in my car, turned on the Yankees, and the dulcet tones of John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman provided theatre of the mind for what turned out to be a shitty game as I made my way the hour back north to my humble river valley, where upon arrival I made myself a bowl of cereal, checked my email, and went to bed, kept awake yet for hours by the caffeine I’d ingested prior to heading out in the first place.