In! To! The! Pit!

After looking at Compare the Mosh Pit.com, a site that puts up pairs of photos of pits and asks you to pick the winners - think hotornot.com with wild flailing arms - it strikes me that what really defines a good pit (or at least a good pit photo) is when you have to look twice to tell if you're looking at a mosh pit or a riot. Limbs should be flailing, people should be packed like sardines and clinging to the edge of balance from the constant movement, and - of course - everyone should be having a pretty good time. In fact, we at Baroque Bleak Brutal celebrate the mosh pit in all of its majesty: that's why the photo of a pit - taken at this show - adorns the background of our blog's banner.

h/t: Reign in Blonde

Again We Rise: Children of Bodom - Follow the Reaper

True to Iron Maiden's promise at Madison Square Garden in 2000, the decade that followed has seen a resurgence of metal that not only obliterated the specter of death staking the genre in the 1990s, but makes previous heydays seem puny in comparison. Metal in the 2000s was all about proliferation: new styles emerged, old ones regenerated, and - thanks to the Internet - exposure spread like a virus. To highlight all of that success , we're launching Again We Rise, an occasional feature that will celebrate the releases that rose above the voluminous crowd to become classics. Today, Children of Bodom's Follow the Reaper.

As one of the primary musical exports from a country that has generated metal microcosms typical of a population ten to twenty times its size, Bodom were already not so much torch bearers as marchers to the beat of their own unique drum. Be that as it may: with Follow the Reaper they were solidifying their position as the generators of a weird but wonderful thrash/black/power metal hybrid that was simultaneously baroque, bleak, and brutal - with a nice dollop of catchy on top to seal the deal.

Though the album features concert staples like "Hate Me!" and "Bodom After Midnight" that seem born as staples through their use the chanting masses hook that metal and punk acts have exploited for years, it does not follow this formula exclusively: unlike more recent albums, which seem to have followed this arc to its logical conclusion to the exclusion of any other exploration, Follow the Reaper embraces the variety that made this band so interesting and wraps it up in a fairly cohesive package. The title track opens with a quote from a piece of English literature, explodes into Bodom-standard high energy, and riffs through blackened classical forms. "Children of Decadence" splits time between the barely intelligible nihilism in the lyrics and a smoothly-flowing melody line that lives as a constant - if shifting - companion through the song, eventually emerging as one Bodom's better guitar/keyboard duets during the solo. "Every Time I Die" is one of Bodom's slower experiments in the vein of "Angels Don't Kill" and "Banned From Heaven," but unlike later efforts it notches down the speed without getting shmaltzy. "Mask of Sanity," the album's proggiest effort, resting as much on the syncopated keyboard line as it does on the high speed guitars and double bass, but still ties things together for the hooky chorus.

For nine tracks, Follow the Reaper generally moves from strength to strength and - even though it's Bodom and the production sheen starts to blend things together to the point of indistinguishability - offers a worthy effort made more potent by its creation in tough musical times. As the palaces burned, in Follow the Reaper Bodom continued to create music that would catapult them to fame and fortune - albeit with a slowly dulling edge - in the years to come.

The 200th post spectacular!

On the occasion of the 200th post on this blog, although only 16 of them are mine, please enjoy Alexi Laiho from Children of Bodom playing Vivaldi.

In my opinion this is the most touching rendition of the song that has ever been performed by a man who wears nail polish.

Baroness at The Bowery Ballroom

Saturday night was my first conscious experience of the phenomenon of indie metal and - to my memory - my first experience with the unexpected comforts of the Bowery Ballroom, a venue whose Lower East Side location and suggestion of significant age (I don't think they build ballrooms anymore) had always conjured images of a far scuzzier building to my mind. Maybe they cleaned the place up recently, but I didn't fear the acquisition of infectious diseases on contact with the air and the acoustics were really quite impressive.

I mentioned indie metal above; I think the most interesting part of the whole night was the idea of a bunch of fairly unevil (if slightly crazed) looking dudes playing loud music that only people who weren't metalheads would identify as metal. That's no knock against Baroness or opening act Coliseum, but merely an observation of the oddity of seeing one's subgenre coopted in ways that - for all of metal's versatility - only barely fit within the confines of the genre. Did I bang my head, pump my fist, and jump around a bit? Sure. Could these guys acquire the label of post-punk just as easily as that of metal? Definitely. There was some riffage and technical skill on display, but it - and most of the people watching it - were light years away from the old school uglies I saw this summer in New Jersey or the kids beating the crap out of each other a month ago at the Hammerstein.

Perhaps the biggest evidence of a stranger in a strange land mentality was the clothing of choice. I was with two of my bandmates (both big Baroness fans who'd convinced me, a virgin to their sound, to go); we were wearing t-shirts from Opeth, Darkthrone, and Celtic Frost. We spent most of the night playing a mental game of counting the shirts of bands like Mastodon and High on Fire all around us. At one point, Seth came back from the bar and said he'd seen some evidence of true metal: a kid wearing a Children of Bodom shirt. Later on, I wondered about the possible results of an ethnomusicological study of the indie metal community.

Children of Bodom at the Hammerstein Ballroom

I'm starting to wonder if I should impose two year gaps between Bodom viewings...or that the theory I've heard about the band's inability to really rock a headlining spot has a ring of truth to it. Either way, I left this show feeling less pumped up than I had when Bodom played Gigantour earlier this year.

I suspect the problem might have been my own head space more than anything else: Bodom was the last night in a long string of late nights with no sleep, I had been rocked by GWAR while drinking heavily the night before, and frankly I couldn't bang my head with my usual alacrity as a result. I had also developed a morbid fear of accidentally smashing my head into someone's shoulder, which almost happened the night before. For me, the live experience is all about feeding off the energy and submitting to barely-controlled animalistic instincts for a little while; when I can't do that, or can't do it without letting go of the stream of conciousness of my ego, I don't enjoy myself as much.

So that was the bad. The good was in little things:

1. The show was twice as long as I had expected in a good way: having not done any prep work, I missed the inclusion of both The Black Dahlia Murder and Between the Buried and Me.
2. I hadn't heard Between the Buried and Me before that night and their performance proved to be an excellent introduction to their work. I didn't think "progressive deathcore" was possible as a genre, but clearly I'm not giving the deathcore guys enough credit. The recorded material I've heard so far seems pretty consistent with what I was hearing through my surprised shock, so Between the Buried and Me may have garnered themselves another fan.
3. I spent the last two sets up in front, hoping to tap into a bit more of the life coming from the stage (makes me sound like a vampire, doesn't it?). At some point during Testament's set, the three small pits in the very front opened up into one long pit that ran like a wound parallel to the stage for about 40 feet. At one point, a guy who had to be a bit under six feet and well over 200 pounds decided it would be an excellent idea to run the length of the pit and plow into an unsuspecting group of concertgoers clustered at the end. Unfortunately for them, he made it. I'm surprised they didn't knife him afterwards for being such a douche.
   

Did Alexi Laiho Learn English From Redubbed Japanese Movies...

...Or did he just go to the Scott Weiland school of lyric writing, where students learn to write lines of songs that literally make no sense but still emerge a theme? I'm reading through the lyrics of Blooddrunk right now, working on an angle for the album description, and while I can eventually pry the meaning - or a meaning - out of the words by reading long enough and looking for the 10,000 mile view, I wouldn't say there's anything particularly coherent going on line by line. An example, from "Roadkill Morning":

Bastard of Bodom, reporting
That sharp pain always go's away
How did I get here once again?

I have to shoot to survive
Otherwise screech "I wanna fucking die"
But I need the bottle and I'll be fine

Based on the combination of statements about alcohol and pain contextualized in the near past in both this snippet and the rest of the song (not to mention the title), I'm guessing "Roadkill Morning" is about a really bad hangover, probably combined with some post-brawl bruising and maybe a broken heart, too. Of course, it might be about something else entirely, and I'm missing the meaning - if there even is one, and these songs aren't just words strung together to match a general mood - because I can't find my way around the syntax. Here's the kicker, though: I'm not sure if Laiho throws out verbal landmines left and right because he's trying to get the listener to dig for subtlety, or because his English skills are less up to par than his stage banter might suggest (not that he gives monologues on stage or anything, but he seems to have some idea of what he's talking about, like doing a substitution rhyme of "motherfucker" with "trucker." I feel like you need a basic understanding of the language to do that). Maybe he writes everything in Finnish and then translates it afterwards?

Partially related: Every image I include in my posts comes from Google Images, as part of a common practice where bloggers break copyright laws by taking images from other sites without permission (the process is self-perpetuating, too; according to my site statistics, most of my traffic comes from images.google.com). The image I grabbed today happens to be a picture I took back in December, 2006, because it's the first search result for Alexi Laiho. Definitely something to look back on with pride in the declining years.

Gigantour III at Hammerstein Ballroom

I was pretty excited about this show before going; it was Megadeth, after all, and even though I've seen Dave Mustaine and his latest group of instrument-wielding henchmen far too many times over the past three years (Six! Six! What the hell is wrong with me?), they've made up for my terrible first viewing so many times at this point that it's hard not to get psyched up about the upcoming thrashing. Then I found out that Children of Bodom was on the bill.

As I've mentioned in the past, Children of Bodom exerts a strange and powerful influence over me, not unlike that of Megadeth. Putting the two of them on the same bill was a stroke of pure genius, and while people make jokes about a show being too much rock to handle, in this case it was nearly the truth: I thrashed and banged so hard during the two sets that I couldn't sleep properly for the next two days from my aching neck and shoulders and had to call in sick. It's a measure of a good old metal time when you're not only physically exhausted but slightly damaged, too.

What's odd - for me, anyway - about seeing any band (whether I know them well or not) live is that I don't remember very much of the music afterward. Take this show, for example. I know Job for a Cowboy played some wretched-sounding sludge that made anticipating Bodom that much sweeter, like an upcoming feast for a starving man (seriously, they were that bad). I know I was making up words to "Angels Don't Kill" and "Sixpounder" because I was so hyped up I had to scream something, even if they weren't technically the right lyrics. I know my friends and I retreated to the downstairs bar while In Flames played because they were in serious danger of becoming the crap sandwich between two buns of awesome and we had some bullshitting to do. And I know I nearly removed my skull from my neck during "Hangar 18," and that I thought that Chris Broderick did a better job on the Spanish guitar bridge in "Holy Wars" than Glen Drover, and seemed to have more stage presence, too. But I don't really remember much else, and when I try to think of the songs I do know, I just hear the studio versions. Soon enough, the mental pictures from this show will merge with those from other shows, and - if I'm lucky - I'll be left with one framing shot from the whole night, and the feeling that I had a great time.

Bodomoriffic

I love Children of Bodom with a sick, sick passion that makes no sense to me. I had heard them once or twice before this year, but they didn't make nearly the impression they did the first time I loaded up their complete catalog (no, thank you, bittorrent!) into iTunes and let rip in the middle of last year - it was like someone took all of my secret pop rock loves (think Fountains of Wayne) and metalized them - Hate Crew Deathroll was a revelation because it was technically complex, rocked hard but had hooks that would pull down a whale. It doesn't matter that you can never understand what Alexi is singing and that half of the lyrics read like they're aimed at the angsty teenage market - my previously described sick passion was now in full flame. And then I saw them perform live.

On a good day, as they had when performing in New Jersey as a part of the Unholy Alliance Tour, Children of Bodom on stage turns out to be something like musical stage crack: very fun, very addicting and something you look forward to seeing again at the next possible opportunity, even if you're bleeding because someone elbowed you in the head in the pit. To put it even more plainly: they (along with Mastodon) were the highlight of a day that ended with so-so performances by Lamb of God and Slayer, for God's sake. They blew Slayer off the stage (you may direct all hate mail here). To say I was eager for their return would be an understatement; I became mildly obsessed with the idea.

Because I'm a good boy and the metal gods love me, I got my wish, wrapping up my 2006 concert tour at an even 12 with CoB's headlining performance at the Nokia Theatre on December 17, with Sanctity, Gojira and Amon Amarth opening. You can read the official review here and see the pictures from the show here.

As far as the unofficial observations go, today's bit isn't so much about the bands as it is about the venue. I'm finding that the Nokia Theatre is rapidly becoming my favorite location to see a metal show in NYC, especially when I have press access. To be sure, there's the three 3-star-or-better shows I saw there in 2006, but this time around I discovered what really makes the difference between this venue and, say, Irving Plaza, the scene of such recent disappointment.

First of all, the barriers didn't collapse, which was really, really awesome by itself. Second, if you've got the right pass, security doesn't really care what you do. I could have hung out in the interview room, although that might have gotten embarrassing when the bands showed up expecting to answer questions (not something I'm ready to prep for). When the three song limit for shooting pictures was up for each band, I retreated to the VIP balcony to the left of the stage, where I not only got some great angles for additional shots but found that all rules are basically suspended - security doesn't care if you stand on chairs, smoke pot, have sex in a corner; it's all good because the Man doesn't really come up to the balcony, except to shine flashlights on the crowd surfers so the guys in front know who's coming up to the barrier. By the way, I only engaged in one of these activities - I'll leave you to guess which one, to keep some mystery going in this blog.