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Faceless, The Concert Review
Up until the beginning of Ion Dissonance’s set, my main issue with last Friday evening at Logan Square Auditorium had been the abysmal commute time. Two hours and twenty miles is unacceptable; Mr. Rod Blagojevich, I would appreciate it if your ‘Open Road Tolling- October ‘06’ would actually get finished. Thank you.
But I suppose I should work chronologically, so as not to skip over some of the good parts.
Although traffic was wretched, I arrived with a bit of time to spare and due to Logan Square Auditorium’s wonderful parking (perhaps my favorite thing about the place), was in line to enter within minutes. A few rowdy drunks were behind me, but spirits were high, and the weather fairly mild for the middle of December, so the wait to get in was quite tolerable.
The Auditorium itself is really just a wide empty room upstairs in a building with some old fashioned décor and drapes, and was approximately a quarter the way full when I entered. Merch tables and the bar are set towards the back, under a small private balcony jutting out over the sound booth. The far end of the room has the stage in the middle and equipment dumps to either side, making the entire experience rather local in feel but national in talent.
The first band setting up was one I had not known were playing and knew nothing of before the show. They are a four piece from Indiana called Decrypt, playing rather fierce death/grind with a healthy dash of pornography in their lyrics and attitude. Lead vocalist Justin Wallace performed the set in cut-off shorts and shirtless, feigning masturbation and cutting rather satirical two-steps during their most breakdown-like moments. He reminded me somewhat of a more restrained GG Allin, actually, in attitude and constant homo-erotic references. Their guitarist, Chris Montez, looked quite the scummy part, belting out scads of gutter-metal riffs with his single lock of hair falling into his sneering face. The bassist and drummer, while competent, were essentially non-entities compared to the antics of the other two members, but they did not seem to mind to back seat or the fake handjob Justin gave to bassist Jimbo.
Chris and Justin stage dove a few times throughout the set; Jason’s first was practically straight forward in a somersault before crashing to the ground along with some unlucky fans beneath him, and to end the set Chris did the same, guitar still in hand. They’re both lucky they didn’t break their necks, using such poor technique and considering the relatively sparse crowd that was up front at the time.
Before one of their tracks, they asked if there were any Nasum fans in the audience, and the crowd response was honestly pitiful. I think even the band was surprised by how few people recognized the name, but they dedicated the next song, ‘off of Inhale/Exhale’ (which was initially a let down, that being one of my least favorite records from the band), to Mieszko anyway, and kicked off the title track with another stage dive from Justin. The cover itself was actually quite good, capturing Nasum’s steamroller vibe and their outstanding guitar tone both. Kudos to them.
They played for about 30 minutes and then gave way to The Faceless, who began setting directly thereafter (some still bundled in their coats, amusingly). The Faceless are a brand new (seriously, 2005 formation date) technical death metal/core band out of California, already with a full length under their belt and a decent-sized following, from what I understand.
Lead guitarist Michael Keene was setting up in front of me when I noticed him pulling out his cell phone. I thought a call at that time would be a little inappropriate, but he actually was trying to take pictures of the audience. As vocalist Derek would later tell us, this was the biggest show they had ever played, and ‘wanted to have something to show the Moms when we get back home’. From the second row (a spot I protected fiercely all night), it was easy to lend Michael my camera for a couple shots, poor though they turned out to be.
From the moment they started, the crowd was seriously entranced. I don’t know how many had heard The Faceless before that night, but their outstanding technical leads and smattering of keyboard harmonies certainly caught all our attention. None of the instrumentalists moved around very much (in fact, guitarist Steve Jones stood I think in the exact same spot the entire night just grooving and nodding his head), but Derek was a pretty energetic presence and the music spoke for itself.
It might have been the fact that I was positioned directly in front of Michael’s amp, but at this point in the show I noticed the first instance of what would become disappointing trend of poor production. All the rhythm guitars (and for The Faceless, their keyboards) were nearly inaudible—I could hear smatterings of their harmonies and leads, but for the most part it was a one guitar show, for me. Yet, The Faceless rocked pretty damn hard nonetheless, and got the crowd, a little bored up until now, moving well in a few pits. Apparently this is the fourth tour they have ever done, and I must say they are handling themselves rather well. Good luck to them.
And it was now that I began to see the emovers, zip-up hoodies, Medusa piercings, and dyed hair crawl out of the woodwork. Yes, my friends, the hardcore kiddies were here. It was for Ion Dissonance, they came.
Who, as it turned out, were really rather un-scene themselves. One of their guitarists looks like a tubbier Jamie Kennedy, their drummer is a skinny long haired guy, the bassist with a shaved head and bound in muscle. The only really ‘scene’ guy, so to speak, was their vocalist, who had the beanie hat, the zip-up hoodie, myspace band merch all over the place (from his shirt to his belt, etc.) and gauged earrings.
But, damn, do they know how to tear it up. I myself am not too interested in their on-record performance, as it’s a little too spastic to communicate effective emotion, but live it somehow all seemed to come together. As if it were more complete, or more discernable, which seems contrary to convention. (I have recently discovered that his name is Kevin McCaughey, and he is the replacement for Ion Dissonance’s original vocalist, which likely contributed to their different feel.)
The front rows seemed fairly apathetic at first, but the band themselves were really into it, the bassist in particular with ferocious ‘axe chops’ and the singer with expressive gestures and glares up towards the ceiling and sky above. It was only about four songs into their set when their vocalist said that this was the sickest audience all tour that I realized there had been constant hardcore dancing and mosh and circle pit both while they’d been playing. It was not that those efforts were meager, just that it was all occurring rows behind me. Once he mentioned it, the involvement was stepped up a few notches more, and some of the kids, perhaps tired of dancing, swelled forward and over some of the front row to seize the microphone and shriek along with the words.
At one point, a shirtless middle aged man (one of three, this one fortunately much slimmer than the other two, who both easily topped the 250 lb. mark) started crowd-surfing. Now, crowd-surfing is alright, I suppose, once or twice. But he would simply not stop. Every time he fell, he would get up again and come crashing into more hapless victims, myself (and my camera) included. Eventually, he flew into an unsuspecting girl and kicked her in the chest, knocking her over, and not even that stopped him. So that put a damper on the set, but it was still a surprisingly positive experience, despite my initial misgivings.
At one point between songs, a young guy in the front row complained to the one of the guitarists about someone or another kicking someone else. I had thought he was referring to the crowd surfer, but after the set was over the muscle-bound bassist came back onstage, walked over to the guy and really chewed him out for something, saying he had to ‘get over it’, and that it, ‘wasn’t my fault’. Not sure what they were talking about, but it seems odd to deal with that sort of thing so out in the open and so vehemently.
Skinless were next. I still haven’t gotten anything on record of theirs, and don’t know if I will, but damned if they don’t put on one of the best live shows around. And the crowd knows it. So as they worked through the layover, the crowd started pushing in a bit tighter, and the anxiety first experienced for my camera’s safety during Ion Dissonance’s set increased about tenfold.
I was a little thrown off, too, as when I saw them but two months ago their guitarist Noah had a beard while bassist Joe was clean shaven, but in the interim they had switched it up. This is a really foolish observation, but I rarely see bands more than once unless they are local, and the little things like that stick out, sometimes. Anyway, once Jason came onstage with his long stringy hair and German gas mask to their trademark sample voiceovers, it could only be Skinless. They launched straight into a 45 minute barrage of gory modern death, inciting numerous circle pits and good old fashioned moshing.
Jason, being the magnanimous lead man that he is, would dash from side to side as he growled, sometimes striking dramatic poses and generally doing an excellent job of keeping us all involved and excited. Guitarist Noah provided an outstanding sound for a solo guitarist, and in brief solo moments bassist Joe respectably held his own. Chris is still on drums for them, and is doing as good a job as any, I believe, and certainly fits well amongst the high company of Skinless’s drummer roster.
And what’s a Skinless show without crowd participation. The first, as usual, was the wall of headbangers on stage. This time, unlike Mokena, the crowd was quicker to catch on the idea and by the time the song started (and I couldn’t see a single band member) there must have been 25, 30 people up on stage throwing horns and thrashing their heads. But the Logan Square security, in the first of a string of questionable decisions, halfway through the song started shooing people off the stage. They hadn’t been doing anything, just having a good time, but that apparently wasn’t permissible. Not that security seemed to mind when multiple people would stage-dive at once, though, crushing the people beneath.
A few songs later, featuring more classic Skinless sound samples and plenty of cuts from ‘Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead’, and then it was time for the Skinless tsunami of death. Essentially a wall of death, but front to back, not side to side. This causes significantly more damage, the front group having the stage to both support and crush them, and no doubt gives the band members a kick, seeing a horde of slavering kids rushing towards them as they play.
And the final crowd participation event this time was not the chicken fight. It was another wall of death, but not any ordinary wall of death. A ‘zombie’ wall of death. The audience was instructed to take one step per beat, towards each other, ‘slooooowly’ and walking, ‘like a zombie would walk’. Sounds absurd, but it actually ended up being rather interesting. Not that half the audience seemed to be able to follow the one step per beat rule, but from those who did and the eventual zombie mosh that occurred, it actually looked pretty good. Those crazy Skinless boys.
A song or two more with ‘Crispy Kids’ as the closer, and they were through, receiving much applause. For my money, probably the most ‘complete’ set of the night, in all senses of the word.
And then, Necrophagist. The mood of the crowd tangibly shifted at this point. Everything up until then was fun, but Necrophagist is sort of considered as a clinical cult experience by the band’s fans, so we either stood in silence or exchanged past experiences, all reverential and full of praise.
Up to this point, even when members of the various bands had come on stage to warm up or move their material, the crowd had been rather quiet. But as soon as Sami appeared, Necrophagist’s rhythm guitarist, the cheers began. He has been in the band less than a year, but many in the audience recognize him already, and with good reason. He’s rather difficult to miss: a tall, pale, and haunted looking character, rather friendly for all that and maybe actually faster at guitar than Muhammed himself.
And as he warmed up, as we ogled the cabs and heads (one of which literally scrolled the digital readout ‘Necrophagist’), I decided that Necrophagist riffs are on the short list of bands whose material can immediately fire up a crowd. If a guitarist of any band busts out a bar or three of ‘Raining Blood’, ‘Symbolic’, or something to that effect, the crowd’s response is guaranteed to be ecstatic. And the stuttering riffs and pinches of ‘Fermented Offal Discharge’ and ‘Stabwound’, I think, elicit a similar response. We could hear Muhammed, too, as he ran his scales, standing off-stage out of sight as he always does. Their drummer Hannes looks as though he’s barely past twenty, and I had to remind myself again that their bassist Stefan is a true master, playing his six-string with all four fingers with remarkable ease.
After about half an hour of set up and tuning, they were ready. Muhammed swooped in from off stage once the lights went down, checked his amp, and immediately charged into their classic opener, ‘Stabwound’, still one of the best 3 minutes in all of metal.
It could again be the buried production of the second guitar, but something sounded a little off with many of the band’s riffs that night. As if they were half-full, or a half a second off. Muhammed seemed a little frustrated time to time, so perhaps it was a technical thing, but I think it more than that.
Their set included the traditional survey of Epitaph and Onset of Putrefaction, catching most of the best from either and a few of Epitaph’s lesser known, slower cuts, during which Muhammed busted out an entirely harmonic solo, relatively simple but effortlessly performed. Sami was spot on, as always, as was Stefan with his numerous featured sections, and while Hannes’s fills were also impeccable his blasts seemed like they were playing catch-up from time to time. At least, though, the kit production was solid, and none of the buzzing from Skinless’s last Illinois set at Mokena carried over to tonight.
About halfway through their set, the crowd started to really get into it. Until this point they had simply been watching, the rookies probably awed, the experienced respectful. But once ‘Seven’ and ‘Foul Body Autopsy’ arrived, the real shoving and stage charging began. Not to get on the stage itself, really, but just to barge to the front. I, luckily, deposited my camera on stage between two amps for this, to better fend off attacks on my spot, but I still got hit directly by a diver from side stage, the guitarist from the opening group, and a guy in the front row was by the end sporting a massive black eye that took up half of his face.
Security did nothing about this, of course. The stage guards seemed to spend most of their time either zoning out or chatting it up with their friends, really not knowing what was going on in the crowd and not doing much about it. I usually wouldn’t complain about it if it weren’t for a few things. One, there was no photo pit, which not only provides me with a space to shoot, but also acts as a buffer zone for the performers. It’s one thing for Jason Keyser of Skinless to prop his foot on a fan’s shoulder for a verse (truly a metal gesture, and one of the night’s most amusing moments), but it’s another thing entirely for crowd-surfers to crash the stage.
During Necrophagist’s final song, ‘Fermented Offal Discharge’, as Muhammed blazed through the final solo full of arpeggios, sweeps and taps, that same idiot crowd-surfer from before flew onto the stage, toppling the microphone and himself into Muhammed. The solo was of course stopped, the microphone askew, and Muhammed had to approximate his position and pick up again while the crowd-surfer just waltzed away. Not only this, but not a single stagehand came to fix the microphone, which had been so tilted that singing into it was impossible. It was obvious that as he played, Muhammed was aware of this—his usual perfect calm looked shaken, but he admirably finished the solo and actually started to improvise a bit, drawing the pick down the strings and carrying on for a few seconds before a fan reached in and pulled up the microphone’s back end. Muhammed nodded kindly, finished the song, and, to his credit, bid us farewell and gave us thanks without a single harsh word or any sign that he had been so rudely interrupted.
Their set was a disappointing 45 minutes, but afterwards, as always, every band member came forth to meet and great, Muhammed in particular being swamped by 30 or so fans brandishing booklets and handshakes, some presuming to actually hug the guy, who is surprisingly diminutive for such a monstrous guitar presence.
And again, to his credit, once the security crew started shouting at everyone to get out and the sound producer started cursing at everyone in his sight (as someone appeared to have spilled beer on his soundboard), Muhammed rather calmly moved everyone to another side of the auditorium and continued to talk, not taking the excuse to run off.
As if the Logan Square administration had not displayed its ineptitude enough already, as I talked to Noah of Skinless a girl came up asking if he was in one of the bands. He said that he was. She asked where Necrophagist was, seeming oblivious to the fact that 3 of the members were still directly in the vicinity of the stage and had just finished playing not 5 minutes earlier. Noah, talking to fans himself and manning the merch table, was in no position to go show her who was who, so I had to lead her to Sami, apparently so she could pay the band for the show.
Rather disillusioned in what I had until that night thought to be a professionally run establishment, I decided it was time to leave. Before, though, I spent some time talking to Muhammed (who I think was surprised and a little relieved to be able to speak to someone in German instead of having to decipher garbled English from overexcited teen after teen). Necrophagist has been touring for weeks and weeks, already having come through Chicago not six months ago, and the fact that these guys still have to play to small crowds and deal with as amateur a management crew as they do is a shame.
I’ll still go back, though, so long as the parking stays free, the bills stay as excellent as they have been (this one being superior to the June show, which was no slump itself), and the commute home stays inside half an hour, which it blessedly was.
Overall, a great show marred by poor security, production, and selfish crowd members. |
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