Desertfest 2018: Saturday.

No photos today because Satori didn’t make it to Saturday – boo.

Sloping back to the Electric Ballroom last afternoon after skiving off the day’s earliest sets, I’m just about in time to get a good sightline on Tokyo’s Church of Misery, just as they finish sound check.

Boy, I enjoyed Church of Misery so much. Though I’ve been aware of the band’s existence for a while, I’ve never really made an effort to listen to them in the past, because, well… serial killers. All their songs are about serial killers. I’m not going to try to scale any moral high ground here, but I’m just not very keen on that.

If performing gruelling, sadistic dirges of aural misery inspired by real life crimes is one thing however, what are we to make of a band who sing about them in the context of music that is totally fun and awesome? Ethically speaking, that’s got to be waaay off message, right? Well, regardless. The sound waves hitting my ears are telling my brain to shut the hell up and just enjoy the most exultant set of classic Sabbathian metal they’ve heard in living memory. I mean, it’s not like you can really make out any of the lyrics, y’know? Let’s just spend the next forty-five minutes or so pretending I don’t know about that whole serial killer thing, and enjoy some sweet head-banging.

Something I genuinely didn’t know until I spent some time researching the band prior to writing this however is that, whilst the band’s history stretches back over twenty years, three quarters of the current line-up have only been part of it for about eighteen months, having been recruited by bassist and sole founding member Tatsu Mikami after his former bandmates quit en masse at the end of 2014.

Whilst watching the band on Saturday night, I never would have guessed this. Indeed, with stereotypical Japanese professionalism, these relative newcomers play as if they’ve been carefully honing their material into shape for about a hundred years, hitting that perfect ‘Master of Reality’-into-‘Volume 4’ groove (the very sweetest of Sabbath sweet-spots) with such in-the-pocket conviction it’s impossible not to succumb.

To say Church of Misery are one of the more explicitly Sabbath-derived bands on the Desertfest line-up is… something of an understatement, in spite of the fact that current vocalist Hiroyuki Takano favours a grunge-like growl over an Ozzy yowl. Nonetheless though, they move between ‘Sabbra Cadabra’ boogie and full-on ‘Into The Void’ grind with such obvious love for the instigators of their sound, and whilst taking such care to avoid directly quoting them (something many doom bands could learn from) that…. well basically I’m finding it difficult to avoid finishing each of these paragraphs by just saying “Church of Misery is awesome – end of”. And, in fairness, there’s probably a bit of a Saint Vitus influence in there too, so I can’t accuse them of being too closed-minded.

Also of note here: evidently a man of extremes, Mikami-san appears to be going for a Guinness World Record for the lowest slung bass in history. Seriously, he has the body of his Rickenbacker hanging beneath his knee, meaning he is forced to play with both hands on the neck. How? I don’t know. Why? Probably just because it’s cool. (See the photograph on the band’s Wikipedia page for visual evidence.)

As Church of Misery play, there’s already the hint of a sweet smell in the air, and, suitably emboldened, three guys standing in front of me light up and begin sharing a spliff, Minutes later, security have pounced, escorting them the premises. What a bummer. I mean, I know it’s THE LAW and everything, but given we’re in a crowd within which legalisation of marijuana would probably get about a 95% approval rate, about to enjoy sets by Weedeater and High On Fire, a blind eye or two wouldn’t have gone amiss, y’know what I mean? I’m sure no one present would have lodged a complaint or whatever if a few of the bouncers strategically lost their sense of smell for a couple of hours.

As I vaguely ponder the means by which about twenty guys in arm bands can keep the peace against several thousand concert-goers, a fair number of whom seem to model themselves upon Viking warriors, I realise the Ballroom is swiftly getting pretty packed (far more so that it was for Napalm Death the preceding evening, sad to say), and that as such I’d better skedaddle to the balcony and find something to sit/lean on if I’d going to get a chance of seeing the stage again any time this evening. Even in this modest ambition, I was thwarted by sheer human volume, but thankfully, the upstairs bar was offering some half-decent beer in 500ml cans, so picking up a couple in advance meant I could defend my second row standing position for the next three hours or so. Friends, it was brutal.

(You may consider this dispiritingly nerdy gig-going behaviour, but hey – at least I went to the toilet at some point. The man standing immediately in front of me was there with his elbows on the balcony when I arrived at the venue at 5pm and did not move a muscle or talk to anyone until the end of the show – and believe me, I had my eye on him, coveting his space something rotten.)

Anyway. Weedeater are definitely worth waiting for. I’m aware that, in my writing for this blog in the past, I’ve repeatedly resorted to describing bands’ rhythm sections as “swinging like a wrecking ball” and suchlike, but I really should have held off and saved this terminology for Weedeater, because… they own it, basically, leaving all other potential wrecking ball swinging bands in the shade.

Often feeling like an experiment in how slow and over-saturated you can make a groove whilst still maintaining its integrity AS a groove, their riffs hit you almost viscerally, like a cloud of toxic, bongwater-filtered airbourne filth…. but, they still swing – slowly, fatefully, like watching the walls of your house tumbling in slo-mo.

North Carolina, from whence these bastards hail, may look surprisingly high up the East Coast to those of us on this side of the Atlantic, but Weedeater nonetheless give the impression of having clawed their way up from the very deepest of the deep South – trucker caps and woodsman beards present and correct - though somehow they never fall back on that shit in a way that feels phoney.

Bassist Dave “Dixie” Collins sings in a cracked, hissing croak, like some backwoods boogeyman from a spam-in-a-cabin horror movie, and, though obviously offered up in a spirit of black humour, the unsettling vignettes he intones on songs like ‘It Is What It Is’ (“I’m not quite right / FUCKED IN THE HEAD”) feel down-right terrifying when married to the mulch-thick primordial sludge of the band’s music. (Reading Weedeater’s Wikipedia page today, I learn that the band took a brief hiatus in 2010 after Collins shot himself in the foot “..whilst cleaning his favourite shotgun”, so, make of that what you will.)

Conjuring one of the filthiest, most stomach-churning bass sounds I’ve ever heard from the Electric Ballroom’s long-suffering PA, Weedeater’s music drips with a wild-eyed cannabis psychosis, a feeling of murderous paranoia only barely kept in check by the unbreakable backbone of rock n’ roll that injects a giddy pleasure into even their darkest material.

Much of their set still falls back on their landmark, Albini-produced ‘God Luck and Good Speed’ album from 2007 [if you’re new to the band, that’s the one to go for, I feel], and, as soon as the rousing title track (“mankind is unkind, man..”) tears the lid off the crowd like a fucking can of tuna , our only options are to flee or wallow.

Doom fans being a hardy bunch, the thousand or so folks crowded around me go for the latter. As the riffs reign down, little conflagrations and smoke signals intermittently drift up from the crowd below (never mind the pungent aroma hanging around the Smoking Area behind me), making me reflect that maybe those guys I saw getting busted earlier should just have kept their powder dry a little bit longer. By this stage, security have apparently decided that venturing into the throng every five minutes to pull some sucker out is more than their job’s worth.

The effect of Weedeater’s set is exhilarating and a little sickening. An unsettlingly intense, slightly scary band, I’m unsure whether five minutes in their company off-stage would be the time of yr life, or a trauma that would keep you waking up in a cold sweat for months. But it would be one or the other, that’s for sure – as with their speaker-jeopardising recordings, they provide a vision of life with the mid-range scooped right out.

Right on the final note of their final song, Collins kicks off his shoe, it makes a brief arc through the air, and drummer Travis Owen catches it, exactly on his final beat. So, maybe they’d be fun guys after all…? Jury is out.

“MNER RRAH SMO’ SM FUGGIN’ WEEED” Matt Pike (shirtless, leather wristbands) growls early in High On Fire’s marathon headline set, presumably indicating his support for all those naughty kids in the crowd, although to be honest it’s difficult to tell. He’s considerate enough to bellow the name of each song before the band launch into it, which is a helpful gesture given that I’m over a decade behind when it comes to listening to High On Fire albums, but unfortunately I can’t make out a word.

It’s funny, whilst I’ve always appreciated High On Fire, and own several of their early records, for some reason I’ve never really been able to fully get into them. I don’t know how best to put it really, but it’s as if, by attempting to create a previously undreamed of amalgam of Sleep, Slayer and Mötorhead, they’ve created a sound so monstrously unwieldy that it’s full heaviosity cannot actually be captured or reproduced by conventional recording and playback technology, making their albums difficult to really process or engage with.

I was hoping that, in a live context, their music would finally have room to breath and everything would fall into place as an overpowering cavalcade of AWESOME METAL, but, awe-inspiring though their seventy minute beat-down of a set is on many levels, for me at least, the same issues remain.

If you’ll forgive me for resorting to yet another iffy metaphor, it’s as if High On Fire have built the ultimate, ten wheeled heavy metal juggernaut, and, in the joyous moments when they’re thundering down the highway in it (whenever the drummer shifts into full tilt, Mötorhead-style double-time boogie and Pike shakes out another neck-throttling, synapse-disfiguring solo), it is absolutely mind-blowing, setting hearts racing and fists pumping. To get to those moments though, it takes a hell of a lot of awkward manoeuvring and grinding of gears. In other words, way too much tension, not enough release.

There sometimes seems to be a kind of sadistic impulse at work in their song structures – making us work hard whilst keeping the rewards tightly guarded. And, this evening more than ever, as my numb legs begin to feel like sharpened poles, painfully anchoring me to the ground, I could really go for some sweet release.

By the end of High On Fire’s set, their music has become a formless barrage, rolling over me like pure noise, as my concentration wavers and drifts. This is in no way a criticism of the band, who play comprehensively bad-ass music with tireless energy and dedication, more just some kind of conceptual glitch that occurs somewhere in the course of my consumption/enjoyment of it. One reporter’s opinion, and all that. It’s an awesome set. It’s loud as hell. The crowd go ape-shit. But I get exhausted.

Man. Saturday. I turned up late, I left early, and I still went home feeling like I’d spent ten rounds ducking blows from an angry gorilla. What a weakling. Ring the bell, Desertfest wins!

See you soon for Sunday….