Phil Anselmo and The Ilegals, Author & Punisher, Hymns and Proven @ Hawthrorne Theater 1/18/2014

I don't have a whole lot to say about this show other than the Author & Punisher set because I just don't really care about any of the other acts. I know it's metalhead sacrilege to be indifferent to Pantera and/or Phil Anselmo, but you have to understand my taste. It's all about vocabulary: I like my metal heavy and weird, not so much fast and hard. I certainly understand the enormous influence Pantera has had on pretty much all metal at this point, but it's just not for me. I don't generally care for hardcore music as a whole.

It was a strange lineup, the first two bands were not particularly interesting by any stretch. They each had a handful of dudes trying to start pits without much luck, but the people surrounding me seemed to be bobbing their heads because it felt strange not to. I know I felt weird just standing there waiting for these dudes to finish their sets and typically I'd have gone outside or sat down in the back, but I knew if I moved, I'd lose my spot for the act I went to see.
The crowd was pretty unpleasant too. There were plenty of alright people, teenage dudes who seemed a little cautious about the whole thing and lots of older people who have calmed with age, but they were all outdone by the droves of Pissed Off White Guys. I'm not exactly a peaceful zen-like soul myself, but dear god. I can only handle so many aggro sweaty bald men. I usually love angry bald dudes, that's kind of my "thing" but this particular breed of them is off-putting and there were many who I suspect are or were at some point, tweakers. I caught one outside trying to pick a fight with the bouncer who was ejecting him for reasons unknown. Brodude proceeded to call the bouncer "pussy" and "faggot" and other such endearing terms and chastised him for not fighting him "like a man". I was not the only person who noticed the intense hypocrisy of the aggressor because he wasn't throwing any punches himself. Now, that's a good tactic in most cases when violence is a possibility. Never throw the first punch, but don't egg people on to do it either because you look like a fool. Watching people get wound up is entertaining, but i most definitely feel bad for the bouncers and I understand why many of them turn into dickheads.

First up were Proven, a hardcore band from... somewhere... They had... some guys in the band. They yelled a lot. The singer was so busy demanding the audience give respect to Phil Anselmo and Pantera that the band could hardly get a note in edgewise. He was also wearing a Pantera shirt and a Pantera ballcap. We get it, bub.
I usually try to enjoy whatever it is that I happen to be seeing when I go to shows, but it's getting harder and harder and it was simply impossible for me to enjoy this. My friend Yousef from Faces on The Radio and concert cohort pointed out that the singer actually tripped and fell down and looked rather embarrassed about it. I didn't catch it myself, but I'm pretty sure that if you fall on stage, you take it in stride and own it, especially at more violent shows.
I don't remember a damn thing about their music otherwise. They were't bad, they were just totally uninteresting.

Next up were Hymns. Just so you know, that's spelled H-Y-M-N-S.  Their singer spelled it out for us twice and I think at one point he also told us that he loves us. "I love you" mumbled into the microphone. That became the main joke between my sister and I for the night.
They were kind of a trip though. I think they might have potential if they developed their sound a little (lot) more and figured out what exactly is is they're trying to accomplish. They had a slightly Chimera-era Mayhem vibe going which is a generous comparison, but nowhere near that level of quality. They did not seem at all comfortable on stage. The singer managed to move around a bit, unlike the rest of the band, but his mannerisms were kind of off-puttingly depressive and self-consciously theatrical. At one point he sat down on a monitor to sing and I think he was aiming to look like a weeping angel gravestone or something.  Theatrics are a given in black metal, which is the closest genre I can pin on this band, but this was just silly and unintentionally so.  They might come to be pretty good if they gain more confidence and direction.

One of my sister's many stupid jokes. 

Finally, Author & Punisher was up. Once the first two bands' gear was off the stage, the crowd was able to see the wild setup Tristan Shone has built for himself. It was to hear people talking shit when they realized there were (gasp) keyboards but  once he began playing, they didn't have diddly squat to say. People were visibly stunned. There was a little group of booers in the back by the bar who were pretty vocal, but I kept looking back at the crowd and every time, more and more people had come up to watch whatever the fuck was going on. Last time I saw Tristan play, it was at an industrial music festival and people were used to seeing keyboards and lots of wires and weird shit thrown together, but at a metal show, this was quite out of place. I love watching people get confused by off-genre acts at shows. I also enjoy taking my sister to concerts and watching her get her socks knocked off. Last year I took her to her first metal show, Napalm Death. She had a blast and last night I think her world turned upside down. She also was not wearing any socks to get knocked off because she was wearing sandals. she's lucky she didn't get any TOES knocked off. Every time I looked over at her, she was slack-jawed and absolutely loving it. I guess I'm just doing my job as the older sibling.

This time around, Shone had a slightly different setup that included a rack of 3 microphones made of ventilators which had moving parts. I was not in a good spot to get a good look at them, but one seemed to have a sort of trumpet-mute effect, one made a bizarre clattering sound that gave a gapper kind of effect and you could see the front piece moving back and forth. The third was attached to a long piece of dryer hose, but I didn't see him use that one. Using these and what I assume was a handheld electronic drum pad, he played  a piece that I didn't recognize. I'm hoping it's a new song! He also had a mic attacked to his throat like a voicebox for people who are mute,  which generated insane elephant-like sounds.

Having seen him before, it's exciting to hear the differences in songs each time he plays them. Given the almost completely live nature of his music, there's almost no programming, human error is a big player and I believe it adds a lot of character to the pieces. Terrorbird and Lonely (which seem to be the big "hits") sounded a little slower than last time or on the albums. In Remorse and Melee (one of my favorites) were totally fantastic. "Extremely extreme" was used to describe his music somewhere once and it cracked me up, but it's absolutely true. I've said it before, I'll say it again: Author & Punisher is the most exciting current  act out there. The sheer creativity that goes into the machines is out of this world. This ain't no washtub bass of shopping cart with contact mics stuck to it. These are thoughtfully engineered pieces of industrial art and the music they make is so absolutely brutal yet also incredibly organic. The word that many people use to describe it, independent of one another, is 'erotic' and it's perfect. The truest sense of the word conveys visceral physicality, passion and humanity. The music is so absolutely brutal, gnarly and frightening. It's everything I look for and more.
Yousef and I bumped into Tristan and his label manager whose name escapes me before the show and he was as cool and upbeat as usual. It's great how he's just such a nice normal dude who happens to make the most freakishly disturbing music I've ever heard. Covert weirdos are the best, especially in the music world because people who are content to stand on their music alone rather than padding themselves with some kind of strange wardrobe and subcultural image make me feel like they're insecure about themselves or their art, which is not an appealing attribute.

He was projecting clips from some of my favorite movies, seen here is Andrzej Zulawski's Possession. 

We didn't stay to catch Anselmo because neither of us were really interested enough to deal with the crowd in order to watch an act that we're not really fans of. Instead we sat outside smoking for a little while and went home. I'm old and need to be home in time to catch the 11o'clock news and go to bed with my jar of icy-hot. Since I have nothing to say about that part of the night, I'm going to shareu some thoughts on social interactions, which I will place behind a jump because they're not standard content for this blog.




My sister smokes cloves and I smoke a tobacco pipe and everyone tells me that my tobacco smells like cupcakes or cookies. It's just a cheap black/vanilla mix, but people tend to flip out over it. Now, lots of people smoke pipe because it's a conversation piece. I smoke it because it's cheaper after the initial investment, it takes longer than a cigarette and it's a nice ritual. I don't like to talk to people while I'm smoking. Or ever for that matter, but we'll leave that for another time. Men kept trying to talk to us and we constantly reject their offers of conversation because we're not particularly social people. We talk to each other, communicate in long strings of inside jokes and generally giggle at everyone around us. Men usually react poorly when I send them packing, but for some reason the crowd lastnight was a bit more respectful of my disinterest, and I can't figure out why.  Some people wouldn't take no for an answer thuogh. One man walke dright up to my sister and touched her coat to look at the Depeche Mode pin on it. laughed and told she she was :at the wrong venue" which he seemed to think was totally hysterical. If he had touched by, I would back jerked away from him and said in no polite terms to never ever touch me. Invasion of personal space is a big no-no and especially when it's being done by a male who is (actually, in this case) attempting to put the moves on me. I'm absolutely not a misandrist and I prefer not to think about gender at all (also for another time), but in situations like that I'm sharply reminded of how men often feel an inherent dominance over women and that angers me. My sister was a little more tactful but no less snide about it. He came back and tried to talk to us again, asking what was in my bag, which was a terribly rude and invasive thing to ask. I think more than a few people thought Liz and I were a gay couple. I know I definitely look like a lesbian to people who make ignorant generalizations, my sister dresses the same as I do, but has long hair and we don't look that much alike in the face. Since we're siblings, we have close, familiar body language and I can see why people might think that we're anything more, but it's still a bit creepy.
The one incident tat really jumped out at me though was one man, a young one, who came to sit by us once the patio had cleared out. He said "I guess I'll come sit by you two because I'm bored!" and we ignored him, going on about whatever asinine crap we were havin' a fookin' giggle about. Instead of taking the hint that we didn't want to chat and didn't appreciate the interruption, he took it as a personal rejection. He said "I wasn't trying to hit on you or anything!". This is a weird anomaly, women generally assume that all men are hitting on them and men generally assume that women assume they're being hit on. That's confusing, I know... But it's a heavy ego trip on both sides. I don't assume men are hitting on me every time a stranger approaches me. It frequently turns out that they are, but I don't assume that and it always trips me out when they say that, that they weren't trying to pick me up. This particular subject has been better addressed by someone else a while ago, but I unfortunately cannot find the link. It's an interesting thing though and sociology is next to music, my other main interest in life. Mammalian instincts that evolution hasn't quite wiped out yet. Maybe Thanatos is strong in my genes, but whatever the case is, traditional male/female social interaction is really strange to me because it seems that sex is the intended outcome, whereas I'm used to being friends with men because I enjoy their company, I'm not used to or even interested in these strange mating rituals humans engage in. But as I said, men tended to be more accepting of my rejection and didn't react like I'd just cut their dick off and crammed it up their butt, which seems to be the level of emasculation some men appear to feel when they're rebuffed by a woman.
If anyone wants to share links related to this subject, please do! I have typed far too much about this, and I tend to ramble on when I'm trying to make a point about something I don't really understand. I am aware that I've been quite ineloquent on this subject, especially when it comes to invasion of personal space and entitlement.

Obviously lesbos.