04-14-06

Retreat to Your Dog House Bitch Friday

photo of Watch Them Die bleeding at Churchill’s Pub by Josh Arcurio / ignore

We still have “Satan’s whisper” ringing our ear drums from Wednesday night at ye ole’ Pub. New Art School’s Dominic Sirianni hosted a bill of Oakland’s Watch Them Die, Louisiana’s Goatwhore and Hell’s High on Fire that produced the sharpest aural funnels we’ve ever ‘perienced in a small venue, whuppin’ Unsane and second only (in sheer volume you black-cladders) to Metallica (yes, we know) during Woodstock ’99. Not to mention these purveyors of iPod-shoot-your-boss music brought a wrath of merch bro-lighted by Raiders-homage “Real Men Hate God” stickers and a little DVD player looping TV Carnage titties and Tom Hanks pissing.

photo of High on Fire’s Matt Pike challenging Heaven by JA / ignore

Not enough fashionable irony for you? Aww, too bad. Storming up mountaintops of doom to boot through a sky tinged with Black Flag hardcore aggression on “Bastard Son,” Watch Them Die are a band to invest your stresses in whether you relate to the niche or not. We can’t say no to metal when it habitually handshakes with Westside trash with the friction of a wet electric fence, and more generally for that Wednesday evening, front men who would not dare flinch at a gun-taunt from a gangster rapper on the street. These guys still exist and it borders on Our Band Could Be Your Life inspiration.

We have no an inkling how much merch these bands sold, but does it not border on being one scarily cool flag (we realize they have to keep on, but still)?

Goatwhore were more traditional devil-horn metal with throw-up tatts and while we enjoyed it, we were heavily consumed with staring at kids wearing Dying Fetus t-shirts putting a flashlight on a kid in a Metallica shirt, unbeknownst to him - so hilariously niche was this black tee segregation. Plus, one dude played air guitar for the entire set, 15-feet away from the stage.

If some kid taped headphones to his head made from giant subwolfers, then fully turned up Jurassic Park with his friends hitting pots beside his head with hammers, well, High on Fire were 80% as loud. Like, this is the winged baby that flew out of the snatch of Matt Pike’s infamous doom outfit Sleep (look into it), so no wonder Steve Albini is producing them. Fact: anytime a bass player has a tatt of Zeke, kiss your ass goodbye. “I know it’s late, but it isn’t past your bedtimes, and isn’t there a lot of cocaine down here or something?” mocked Pike. We were shivering like dwarves in tiny frozen snowshoes around a gang of psychotic polar bear-tigers.

Opening with “Sons of Thunder,” the onslaught was megaton and kids stood in place, as if they might take a step and wisp away into a beer mug. So wonderfully tortured was our hearing, when our hair floated against our ears, it felt like a fleeting bushel of shelter. Ending with “Devilution” off their last, Albini-boarded album, Blessed Black Wings, skinman Des Kensel laid down the hammers of God. We just finished reading “The Killing Factory” by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone about the United States military’s recruitment training, and the comparisons are strikingly similar, except this war ended with smiles and no Metallica tracks serving for celebration. Okay, that’s a little NME blasphemous.