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Lair Of The Minotaur Concert Review
Of all the places for post-apocalyptic Mad Max refugees to appear, I would never have figured on Chicago’s south side. But there they were, ambling down State street in a band of six, raggedly dressed and bleary-eyed, smoking cigarettes and scratching dreadlocked scalps. They had come to Reggie’s Rock Club this Wednesday past, where The Ocean made their Chicago stop on the Legions of Winged Octopi world tour, featuring Kylesa, Lair of the Minotaur, and Withered as support groups. I suspect that this particular bunch of fans had more invested in Kylesa than in The Ocean’s highbrow prog leanings, but this was a diverse crowd, all in all, and every band had their cheerleading cliques. These just happened to hark from the land of Thunderdome.
After the doors opened at 8 PM (already a bit behind schedule), I left this fantasy behind and found The Ocean main-man Robin Staps for our interview. With salad in hand, he guided me from one nook of Reggie’s to another, seeking a comfortable place for our talk. We ended up in a subterranean den of a room backstage that served as the lounge, with a rough wooden table, carpeted floors, sticker-covered lockers and bare brick walls. Robin and I chatted while he ate and then got down to business, discussing The Ocean’s most recent effort, ‘Precambrian’, The Ocean’s inspirational “black box”, and the uncharted waters ahead for the band. ‘Precambrian’, our primary topic, is two-disc conceptual piece that melds geological prehistory with passages from the 19th century Lautréamont novel ‘Chants of Maldorer’, a misanthropic diatribe against humanity, among other things. Unusual ground for a metal band, or any band for that matter, but Staps and 25 others executed it in the studio with an approachably modern style, and Staps’s high ambition doesn’t prevent him from being a pleasantly down-to-earth fellow in person.
Due to the length of our interview, I missed Withered’s set entirely and exited the backstage after a few songs from the second act, Chicago’s Lair of the Minotaur. Blending straightforward sludge riffing with hardcore grunts and a penchant for Greek mythology, this group has attracted a diverse crowd over its career and seemed to please just about all of them that nighti. Not everyone in the audience seemed too familiar with their music, but plenty of heads were nodding and a few people up front had clearly come for this band especially.
Lair of the Minotaur don’t write music that is especially new, nor do they execute it impeccably, but more than anything else this seems to contribute to their appeal as a gritty, no-nonsense project where simple, catchy riffs, feedback, and even a few mistakes are welcome flavoring. I personally remain a little ambivalent about the group—the Agnostic Front-style vocals especially—but they put on an enthused performance regardless and got the crowd energized.
Following them was the surprise of the night in Kylesa. Before the show an unexpectedly large number of people had named them as the band to see, and during their set they did indeed have the most vocal and widespread crowd response. The Ocean could be disadvantaged in this comparison by the delays that forced them to go on stage late (and thusly to a sparser audience), but in a head-to-head match-up, Kylesa’s all-American flavor would still impress most audiences Stateside.
I had seen Baroness on the Converge tour play on the same stage just a couple months ago, so another sludge group from Savannah was something of a déjà vu trip, especially considering the other similarities between the two groups. Gibson guitars, strings uncut and fraying around the headstock, extended instrumental sections, some rather skuzzy-looking members balanced by others you’d hardly expect to be in a metal band, etc. This time, though, the surprise member was a woman—Laura Pleasants—and even if she weren’t a member, it seems unlikely that anyone would mistakes Kylesa for Baroness, given the two drummers Kylesa employs.
When the band was setting up, it first appeared as though they were preparing two bass drums of grossly different size, but then the kit began to sprawl out, a second stool appeared, and the two skinsmen took their seats. Neither kit was very full—single bass drum, hi-hat, a crash or two, snare, and a couple toms—and in fact wouldn’t have looked too unmanageable for a single drummer, but the two utilized their tools well and put down any skeptics who might have been thinking ‘gimmick’. Kylesa isn’t a band disposed to polyphony, so Jeff and Carl spent most of their time doubling each other’s beats, which can be just as difficult to pull off as performing two independent parts. Still, one would occasionally range onto the cymbals for a pattern while the other bashed away resolutely on the toms and snare, and once combined with their power technique of both playing the same part, the two were a highlight of the night.
Laura and Phillip had a similar dynamic, both handling guitars and vocals, and set the stage for The Ocean’s two-vocalist approach to come, albeit much more brusquely. Neither Laura nor Phillip seemed entirely comfortable as vocalists, with Laura especially tending to fade out towards the end of her lines as she turned back to the guitar, but their growls and howls were still delivered with admirable vinegar and got the crowd singing along.
During the middle of their set, Phillip’s string snapped and, lacking a backup, he hastily changed it as the rest of the band carried on the song, which was just entering a prolonged instrumental passage led by Laura and her effects pedals. He maintained his poise admirably throughout the process and reentered the performance just in time for the next section. In fact, given how conveniently his exit and entrance worked, one wonders whether the band worked around the accident without a hitch or the audience noticing. In either case, kudos to them for keeping the show going.
Unfortunately, this also meant that the show continued to fall behind schedule, and by the time The Ocean finally took the stage it was midnight, 45 minutes after their scheduled starting time. The venue, once comfortably full, now had perhaps 200 people scattered across the stone seating shelves on the wall, the main floor, and the upstairs balcony. To their credit, the band remained unfazed and didn’t comment once about the bleed-off of the crowd. Instead, they put on a scintillating show filled with LED’s, eerie footage on the projector behind them, and all six members giving focused, passionate performances.
After my talk with Robin, and given The Ocean’s stylistic ambition, I had half-expected their stage show to be a cerebral affair of dreamy visuals and lights while the band stood, immobile, as stone-faced conductors. Was I ever wrong. Almost as if they deliberately intended to dispel that prediction right away, the band tore into their ‘Hadean/Archaean’ material with startling power. That disc is the more aggressive and direct of ‘Precambrian’s two, taking an almost Meshuggah-like approach to massive staccato riffs and giving them a distinctive melodic twist. Robin stood on the far right of the stage, where he had rigged two laptops to coordinate the band’s visuals and lights, which, as the only lighting in the house for most of their set, gave the set an especially otherworldly quality. Once they delved into the ‘Proterozoic’ material, the computers would also trigger the backing studio tracks for the more progressive songs in their set with instruments and layers that the six members simply cannot recreate live.
At the beginning, though, the live show was all, and The Ocean attacked the material and the audience with gusto. Mike Pilat, who began the set as the lone vocalist, was eventually joined by Nico Webers, and the two of them would alternate in a tight tandem throughout the set to give us the full range of The Ocean’s many vocal styles. Robin occasionally supplied some background vocals and did so well, but spent most of his time gesturing violently with his guitar, at one point even knocking over a laptop and carrying on without pause. The other guitarist on the opposite side of the stage was equally vehement, whether he had his seven- or six-string in hand, making abrupt chops and leaping upon the monitors to punctuate an upswing in a song’s momentum.
The band’s drummer was rather hard to see through all this, but he and the bassist were the only ones not fiercely engaged, instead coming much closer to the attitude I’d first expected from the group. The latter in particular looked almost catatonic at times, standing with eyes closed and fingers moving across the strings economically, the light casting deep shadows across his face.
Despite the strong contrast between his presence and the others’, The Ocean maintained a strong cohesion throughout the set, helped in part by their uniformity of dress (jeans and black button-downs). With colored lights flashing and the black-and-white reels above them, their undulating forms almost seemed something other than human, or perhaps mere extensions of a single entity. A true and inspired ‘Collective’, rolling upon the waves.
With such a strong stage show to boast, it’s a shame that more of the audience didn’t stay through its entirety, including an encore of older material that had also constituted the last portion of their set. The thinned ranks were disappointing to see, but somewhat understandable, given that it was a weeknight show that wrapped up after 1 AM, taking place on the south side of the city, no less. Still, those who did stay were appreciative, singing along some for the chorus of ‘For The Great Blue Cold Now Reigns’, whistling and clapping for an encore, then migrating en masse to the merch table afterwards to speak with Robin.
He appeared minutes after the set was over, stopping only to catch his breath and towel off. Then, it was back to reality and the hard ground beneath, talking gear with fans and handling sales simultaneously. In both of the musician’s roles—helmsman of The Ocean or affable merchant—he succeeds with class, and I can only hope that he sets a course through the Midwest once again in the months to come.
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