CAN’T WAIT FOR VINCE’S SCION REVIEW? READ THE ONE IN THE NY TIMES

Not that I trust the opinion of Ben Ratliff more than I do my main man Vince – but while he’s still doing this whole Heavy Metal Road Trip thang, we probably ain’t gonna get a proper review of the show.

So it’s Mr. Ratliff at the New York Times to the rescue! This being the Paper of Record, a lot of the prose is pretty flowery (and by “flowery,” I mean “bordering on pretentious and meaningless”), but it still gives you some sense of how the show went down. Here’s an excerpt:

“What a generation ago would be called hardcore punk is now routinely a part of metal festivals, slotted in as grindcore. Magrudergrind, a trio from Washington, brought a fantastic standard of it: speeding, screaming bullets of songs, squalid and economical two-beat frenzies with quick turns and no bass player. (They don’t need one.) This was at Circus, a smaller club. But over in the smallest of the four — the tiny, dingy basement club Bernie’s Distillery — the Texas black-metal band Absu was going at it with dark eye makeup, horror-house gothic vocals and no letup in its music’s clattery, narrow, obsessive drive. Metal is deep and wide. Between this and Yob lay two miles of college-town strip and an aesthetic galaxy.”

Read the rest here.

-AR