While his A.V. Club colleagues have been enjoying the exciting world of outdoor music festivals, Leonard Pierce has been inside, haunting the dark clubs and enclosed spaces of South Texas for the best in live metal. Since the true hardcore eschew the sunshine, and consider it an act of weakness to abandon their usual attire of long hair, black jeans, and black T-shirts just because it’s 101 degrees in the shade, this has meant no small amount of personal suffering on his part, but suffering has been an essential part of metal since before Bruce Dickinson cajoled the entire city of Long Beach to scream for him. So grab a spot halfway between the bar and the air conditioner, have a Marduk bandana at the ready, and get ready to sweat off a few pounds in the mosh pit as Metal Box takes a look at August’s finest offerings in hard rock and heavy metal.
THE FINAL COUNTDOWN. A terrible admission: while Iron Maiden might be my favorite metal band of all time, I’ve paid precious little attention to it in the 21st century. Oh, sure, I saw the highly enjoyable Iron Maiden: Flight 666 documentary, and loved the hell out of it—Maiden seems to be one of the few aging metal bands that’s still having a blast doing what it does—but musically, its output just hasn’t been on my radar for most of the past decade. I didn’t expect that to change with the release of its latest, The Final Frontier (EMI); I figured to give it a token listen, a perfunctory mention, and nothing else. But damned if Maiden didn’t surprise me: The Final Frontier is a fantastic record, Maiden’s best since 1988’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, and probably the most enjoyable record by an old-school metal band I’ve heard in ages. Combining the skillful prog elements of its late-’80s work with surprisingly complex, structurally difficult songwriting and top-notch playing by Steve Harris and Dave Murray, it’s a genuine accomplishment, and a clear signal that Iron Maiden can still put a bullet between the eyes of anyone it chooses. While other veteran bands can surprise by occasionally cranking out some good material, Maiden stands alone as a band that isn’t yet convinced it isn’t just as viable and full of new ideas as it was 30 years ago.
NORMA JEAN’S MONSTER. We give metalcore a lot of ribbing around here, and let’s be honest: For the most part, it deserves all the crap we can shovel onto it. Every so often, though, a metalcore band emerges from all the negative hype and demands to be given a fair hearing. In spite of the company Norma Jean keeps, I’ve been a fan of the Atlanta group since its killer O God, The Aftermath album dropped in 2005, and while it hasn’t exceeded that high-water mark yet, its new one, Meridional, comes close. To get the bad out of the way, the band is already self-burdened with a terrible name, so it isn’t doing itself any favors with the god-awful album titles. O God, The Aftermath was bad enough, but Meridional even surpasses the ludicrous Norma Jean Vs. The Anti Mother. The album art is ridiculous, too. All that said, Meridional is Norma Jean’s best album in five years: a personnel shake-up left the band much improved, heading back to the stunning Botch-style sound and mathcore complexity featured on O God, but with new elements like drilling industrial guitars and inverted, feedback-drenched guitars thrown in. Best of all, it abandoned the melodic timidity that held it back on its last two releases. If you feel like taking a chance on the future of metalcore, Meridional would be a good place to start.
HUMANS, DOING. On the subject of bands that do their best to transcend an often-vilified genre, The Last Felony from Montreal has been placed in the deathcore box since its debut a few years ago, but with its latest album, Too Many Humans (Lifeforce), it does its best to kick out of that box. The band’s melodic stabs, which by no means overwhelm its other sonic qualities, put it there; if metal were less enamored of labels, the Last Felony would just be considered a new-school death-metal band, with all the intense guitar grooves, moody sonic shifts, and powerful drumming that implies. With Too Many Humans, it dragged in a little black metal for atmosphere, and the result is an album that defies easy categorization and demands a bigger audience than the band has enjoyed so far. It’s no coincidence that it’s touring with fellow Canadian outfit Despised Icon: Both are underrated, highly accomplished bands that have been unfairly maligned in a career that many old-school death metal bands would be proud to have. If nothing else, Too Many Humans features some of the best song titles of the year.
SUMMER + LAUGHTER = SLAUGHTER. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the San Antonio stop of the Summer Slaughter tour at the legendary White Rabbit. A nonstop, daylong assault of top-rank tech death, it was a perfect way to spend a meltingly hot evening in South Texas, when the heat alone is enough to make you want to snap necks. The show got off to a bit of a slow start, but once it got rolling, it was as cool and deadly as an industrial fan. Among the highlights: Decrepit Birth delivered a boiling set of ultra-technical death metal with loads of brutal power—its new album, Polarity (Nuclear Blast), is also highly recommended, especially to fans of ’90s Florida death metal. Cephalic Carnage never fails to deliver a mind-boggling set of incomprehensibly extreme deathgrind, and its new album, Misled By Certainty, is one of the strangest things in a career marked by strangeness. And there was a powerhouse set by The Red Chord, whose exultant, intense grindcore has never sounded better, thanks to the return of original drummer Mike Justian. Rounding out the bill: Vital Remains, Animals As Leaders, Carnifex, the surprising Veil Of Maya, All Shall Perish, The Faceless, and the reliable Decapitated headlining. The tour had just started when I saw it, so those of you in the Midwest and West Coast (and parts of Canada) should still be able to catch it.