Date: Saturday, October 11, 2008
Venue: Music Vault, Harker Heights, TX
Bands: Hexlust, Hands Down, Anesthesia
PRE-SHOW
It’s a well-known principle that a band should sufficiently warm up before playing a show, to make sure that all the music muscles are fully stretched out and ready to go full speed when the song calls for it. If the warm-up ritual is not performed correctly, the gig suffers as a result. Well, sometimes, for whatever reason, a band does not sufficiently warm up. In an even rarer occasion, the performance goes swimmingly anyway. Instead of thanking their lucky starts and promising to do better next time, the band develop feelings of awesomeness, that this stroke of magic good luck is in fact a perfectly natural part of their capabilities. It’s usually the show right after where their new perception of their skills is not only shot down by a bad performance, but rubbed right into their faces by the superior performance of a better band. That tragedy would occur in the next show; for now, though, the unwitting victory.
We got to the Music Vault early, like eight o’clock, so of course it was empty. Which was fine by me, I like setting up my unnecessarily large kit well before showtime, and I hate jockeying for space with a bunch of other bands and all their shit. Twenty minutes later I get that done… and it’s still empty. No problem, it’s only like 8:30, so we wait around and warm up a little (emphasis on a little). Nine o'clock, the doors to the club open, and nothing.
We spent a good like forty minutes milling around, talking to whoever came in. It was excruciatingly boring, at least for me. JT’s then-girlfriend had been there the whole time so he had someone to talk to. Tony met some chick and was spitting mad game, as only Tony can. Finally, our friends in Hands Down showed up and I passed the time talking to Sheena and helping decide on a one-set songlist. For those who don’t know, Hands Down consist of Sheena, her dad Russ, her mom Darlene, and family friend Dan, who plays the only drum kit in Killeen I envy for being bigger than mine. They play some originals but mostly covers. They typically do two forty-minute-or-so sets but since they opened the show this evening they had to pare it down to one.
HANDS DOWN
So Hands Down go on first and do their thing. Tunes included “My Own Worst Enemy,” “Flagpole Sitta,” “Inside Out,” and “Cumbersome,” all of which were well-received by my dad. OH, and they played “Welcome to Paradise,” I remember that cuz Tony and I were singing along to it. The funniest part was when Sheena gave Tarzan her camera with which he could take pictures; he got bored and handed it to my dad, who thought it was our camera and instead started taking cute shots of him and my mom together! I wonder if Sheena still has those.
HEXLUST
Our set does not stick out much in my head, probably because not much happened in the way of badness. I remember we had a fantastic soundcheck with some new guy we’d never seen before who perfectly balanced the two guitarists, put just the right amount of Tony’s guitar in my monitor, and did it all in little to no time. Communication had been an issue during the Battle shows. Same setlist as before, Intro-Troops-Toxic-Hellhammer-Tombs-Sodomy. We had started working on covering Death’s “Open Casket” around this time but were still not ready to debut it live yet. As I said in the first paragraph, we squandered all our extra time by not warming up much, and still had a pretty successful set. This feeling of effortless victory would not last another show.
ANESTHESIA
Up next was Anesthesia, purely covers. Come to think of it, this show was a night for bands with big drum kits who played covers, cuz the drummer in this band had a sizeable double-kick kit! What made Anesthesia stick out was that they had no vocalist; one guitarist, one bassist, and a drummer. But damn did they play some memorable tunes! They opened with “Walk” (ugh) and played some Iron Maiden tune I can’t recall. They also did “Live Wire,” which made me shriek with joy since I’m such a big Crue fan, and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which I got a kick out of since Hexlust had been playing that song for, like, ever. I tracked Tony down and was all “Dude! Duuuude! Dude!” but he was still spitting his mad game so he wasn’t interested. Whatevs.
Not much else interesting happened this evening. Sheena talked to some of the members of Anesthesia about starting a possible metal project, something she's been trying to do for ages, but I don't think anything ever became of that. (EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: Nope.) All in all, a totally ho-hum show.
Note: The title of this post is a goofy in-joke among us, saying that band's name all drawn-out with a Southern drawl. With every successive time we say it, we stretch the "hands" part out longer and longer.
