Shortly after I met Carla she got me into the Song Of The Week group, an e-mail circle of friends who would share music. Not every single thing was life-changing -- there were tracks that weren’t to my taste, some stuff I hadn’t acquired the taste for, a few things just for musicians to appreciate -- but there was overall just some good, new music, and, with some frequency, some tracks that stood out and made me have to pursue them. In our post-radio/post-music-magazine (sometimes even post-blog) world, I don’t pick up on a lot of the new stuff, even enough of it to sort through to find the really engaging stuff. But a track jumped out at me from Deafheaven. I’m not always taken by scraping, screeching metal, but anyone knows I love shoe-gaze, and somehow they not only somehow make melding those two make sense but they also make it tuneful, even poetic. It’s a lot of elements, with barely a semblance of traditional song structure, that pull a minor miracle of being anything listenable. They even did it for more than one album, like they know the trick and this is their thing that they’ll keep doing. And the first one still hasn’t been touched by anyone: Sunbather is still a maze to me no matter how many times I’ve gone through it. We missed the band at FYF due to working the next day so there was an obligation to finally see them, and playing the Echoplex made it an easy sell. It wasn’t exactly a metal show with a bunch of headbangers, but some indie heads and modest, conservative appreciators of alt-metal, the kind that would have been as into Helmet if that wasn’t now their dad’s music. It got hot and sweaty in there but there was barely a pit. The singer could have looked the part, with the long hair, and as magnetic as he’d need to be to get something so “screamo” -- as Carla called it, surprised this was that kind of band -- even facing toward anything resembling approaching the mainstream. If that guy had to front some kind of band, it might as well be screeching metal (or “blackgaze” or “post-metal” or whatever). The rest of the show was an electric grind through a lot of show cuts, constantly being interwoven and recombined into a lot of new things, showing off the newest album, New Bermuda. and layering on thick slabs of noise that might have wandered forever if the riffs didn't wear out Like their albums, there weren’t a lot of actual songs but the sound was in massive chunks of emotive metal. Truth in advertising: there was heavenly bliss in going deaf (as if that has never been printed in a review before). We had to leave just before the last song, which could have been half the show for all we knew, but for all the force and intensity and volume, we’d gotten a lot. The openers were Health, some local fellows who have gotten around but we’ve already missed. They had their guitars but they were jauntier (as anything would be, compared to the headliners), even dance-y at point. They didn’t even have to play their “Blue Monday” cover (even if that was my only connection to them, on the Atomic Blonde soundtrack). They might have been prized for being available rather than being in line with Deafheaven, but they were a good warm-up and maybe a band we won’t miss at festivals anymore (though I might still run into at O'Hare airport). WIFE and Chasms might also have opened, but we didn’t get there that early.
“Brought to the Water“
“Luna“
“Baby Blue“
“Language Games“
“Unrequited“
“Cody“ (Mogwai cover)
“Dream House“
“Irresistible“
“Sunbather“
“Daedalus“
"Victim"
"Men Today"
"Die Slow"
"New Coke"
"Tears"
"Salvia"
"Crimewave"
"Stonefist"
"L.A. Looks"
"USA Boys"
"Courtship II"
"Dark Enough"
"Heaven"
"Crusher"
"We Are Water"
"Perfect Skin"
