FIVE PART HARMONY AND FEELING: Alright, alright, there's not a lot of harmony here, but oh, what a feeling!
If you're from the '90s*, and have The Metal Gene (speed or grunge variants), you'll remember Helmet. They're still around, or back, with changed personnel, but it's the old Helmet that really did it for me. The original Helmet, John Stanier's Helmet, had drumming like automatic weapon fire, like an odd number of metronomes amped up on a cocktail of meth and semi-effective anti-psychotics and layered beneath an irresistible roar that worked to give psychological validity and something like the authority of myth to lyrics that, presented straight, wouldn't have drawn a B- from the creative writing proctor in your Freshman English class. That Helmet. This Helmet:
At the 5 minute mark, where the slower grind and pound of Tic gives way to the positively frenetic Ironhead -- right around there, a guy can get religion.
As you can see, that was captured live in 1994 at the Ogden Theater in Denver, Colorado, by a fellow who styles himself Denco83 on Youtube. He's got a a whole channel full of fun stuff, and I'm plugging it here because I've found myself at that link more than a dozen times in the last month. Shame he wasn't in a position to get more of Stanier.
*I am from the '90s.
I saw them at about the same time in Seattle, at the Weathered Wall, I think. They were opening up for somebody local, I can't even remember who. I had heard of them, but knew nothing about them. Then they came on stage, dressed unlike anybody grunge, with decidedly ungrunge crew cuts, and played that murderous, percussive stuff. Coming out of the loose, sloppy haze of whoever played before them and whoever the headliner was, I think people didn't know what to make of that kind of martial sound. I sure didn't.
ReplyDelete<span>Are we having some sort of secret "quote Alice's Restaurant as much as possible before Thanksgiving" contest?</span>
ReplyDeleteNot formally, but now that you mention it, I can't think why not. I've got my shovels and rakes and implements of destruction right here...
ReplyDelete