At 'Metalfest,' trying to be heard amid dischord of screaming guitars
WORCESTER -- Outside, bright springtime was parading along Main Street, coolly, teasingly, with its baby-blue pennants a-flutter. But springtime in Worcester means putting on your Goatwhore hooded sweatshirt and heading for the booming cavities of the Palladium. Last Friday, on day one of the eighth annual New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, good weather had very little to do with it.
Three days. Ninety-odd bands. Two stages, two loud chambers of hell, with only (or so one intermittently felt) a row of vibrating urinals to separate them. The aged Palladium -- flaking Art Deco theater, ancestral seat of the Northeastern heavy metal kingdom -- rumbled with pleasure.
At 2:40 p.m., the Western Massachusetts band Ligeia took the smaller, upper stage, and with the first chord of its set the dance floor was blown into ritual space the crowd scattered as if in a centrifuge, the ''circle pit" began.
The New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, or ''Metalfest" as it is known to the cognoscenti, has become a serious player in the ever-burgeoning heavy-metal industry. A proving-ground for bands not yet visible enough for enormous metal tours like Ozzfest and newer Sounds of the Underground, as well as a high-credibility showcase for the occasional big name, Metalfest has helped to break plenty of the current headliners.
It has also consolidated the hugely popular Northeastern scene based around bands such as Killswitch Engage and Shadows Fall, both of whom played the main stage in 2003. Organized by booker Scott Lee and promoted by Mass Concerts, the festival caters to a specific subdivision of heavy metal: no ''stoner rock" here, and none of the despised pop metal of Godsmack or Staind.
On the other hand, there is barely a band in the existing canon of ''extreme music" that has not crossed one of the festival's stages at some point, from critical darlings Mastodon (who played upstairs in 2002) to Egypto-metal headcases Nile. Performing for the most part in 20-minute bursts and kept rigorously to schedule, the bands whose dingy, splayed vehicles line Central Street have everything to play for and in some cases nothing to lose.
At 1:30 p.m. Friday, before the Palladium doors opened, a foursome called Scarlet, from Richmond, Va., were standing around outside, in the way that bands always seem to stand around in a wary, disconnected formation, all looking in different directions. ''This is just one of those shows you have to play," said guitarist Bryan Tolbert. ''You've gotta do it. This scene's getting bigger and bigger, which is cool, but at the same time it's harder to stand out."
So how do you compete?
''Do what you do!" Tolbert said.
''Get lucky," said drummer Andreas Magnusson.
''Wear shades," said vocalist Brandon Roundtree, who was wearing shades.
Scarlet had no idea where they were staying that night: ''Somewhere in New Jersey. . . maybe. . .," muttered Tolbert.
An English-speaking Martian, landing amid the festivities at the Palladium on Friday, might have imagined that some emergency of the human spirit was in progress. Everyone was in black. The T-shirts worn by concertgoers seemed to be engaged in a contest of paranoid denunciation. ''Consumed By Your Poison" yelled one. ''I Was Born to Crush You" roared another.
The musicians onstage appeared unanimously outraged, mad as hell, in the last extremity of indignation. And the band names: Ringworm, Necrophagist, Thine Eyes Bleed. . . . But behind all this grimacing and symbology were some very pleased young people. ''Sick, dude!" shouted one happy consumer after a set by Syracuse's Ed Gein; there were growls of assent all around.
Metal, being a physical discipline, has evolved more along the lines of a track event than an art form: The lowliest metal drummer can now ripple through polyrhythms with both feet while tuning his snare and smoking a cigarette, and the least ambitious guitarist achieves speeds that only madmen dreamed of 20 years ago.
And so too with the dancing: The lumpen slam-dance and the random mill of the mosh pit have been superceded by a sort of individually expressive Dionysian karate. Dancers now lope scowling along the radius of the pit, arms hanging low, before jumping into the unoccupied center with windmilling fists, capoeira-style sweeps, reverse roundhouse kicks, personalized freak-outs. Then they withdraw, prowl around for a couple more laps, go whirling in again. And no one gets hurt.
In truth, Metalfest is less a festival -- nothing carnivalesque about it; no gypsies, fire-eaters, men on stilts, or vegan soup stalls -- than a convention, at which successive bands rise to give what's really a series of 20-minute dissertations on the state of heavy metal, before an audience of their peers.
The general argument at Metalfest 8 seemed to be that the cross-pollination of metal and hardcore is now complete, and that the way forward is a continued elaboration and refinement of ''metalcore": punishingly synchronized tattoos of double bass drum and downtuned guitar chug, discordant departures, ultra-fast ''blastbeats" and belch/roar vocals with occasional blurts of melody.
The concensus on this was remarkable: I've never heard so many bands sound so similar. To expert ears, a hundred variations might've been detectible. But for the semieducated listener, the differences between bands were differences of degree rather than kind -- a question of measuring the percentage of Meshuggah (Swedish math metal) in the sound against the percentage of Agnostic Front (New York hardcore).
At 7 p.m., the last band on the second stage, Denver's Cephalic Carnage concluded its set. Downstairs, The Acacia Strain, from Springfield, with a sound accurately described on its website as ''bludgeonous," took up the slack.
''Set this place off!" commanded vocalist Vincent Bennett, looming over the highly disciplined dervishes in the pit.
''No fights! No one here is better than anyone else, and that includes the people on this [expletive] stage!"
Heads down, round and round. Plenty of time later for fresh air and daffodils.
