Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013
Venue: Korova (basement), San Antonio
Bill: Army of Drunks, Last Stage of Decay, Reign of Tyrants, Hexlust, Weapönizer
Has it been seven months since the last gig already? Last year was a busy one for us, more personally and professionally than musically, which is why the metal world only got two Hexlust shows and still no album in 2012. In fact, we only played those shows because we had them booked months in advance so we could have time to align our planets correctly. Anything offered sooner than that had to be turned down.
Hopefully, now that everyone's lives have evened out, 2013 will see us playing more shows, with an emphasis on venturing more outside of our San Antonio stronghold. We've already made progress in this direction by booking five shows from February to April, all in San Antonio.
Yeah, adventure scares us.
Completion and release of the album will be discussed eventually, but we can't even sneeze into a mic unless we have money to book studio time, so shows are the priority for the time being.
PRE-SHOW
I don't think we've ever played a set list as improvised as it was tonight. Sure, we've come up with sets in the parking lot before shows and even on the fly onstage, but when we do that we pick from a pool of well-rehearsed material, not from the nether reaches of songs we haven't even seriously practiced in well over a year! Well, after Tony and I got to the Korova and greeted our bandmates, we all observed Weapönizer maneuvering into a parking spot and talked about how they cover "Sodomy and Lust," and hey, maybe we should play that song tonight as well! Wouldn't that be a gas?
Granted, for the past couple years we'd been sticking with "Agent Orange" when it comes to covering Sodom, and yeah it'd be less redundant to have a different cover to put up against Weapönizer's, but that song is long-winded, mildly technical, and consists of more than three riffs. It requires some actual rehearsal before whipping out for a paying audience. "S&L," however, is simple in structure and technique, plus it's so far pounded into our systems from having covered it since our very first show that we figured we could pull it off with absolutely no practice at all. We even ran this idea by the Weapönizer dudes and they were all for it.
Even if they didn't like it... yeah, we wouldn't have played it. What else would we do, rumble for it? Have you SEEN those guys? I wouldn't fight them with fifty friends!
Nope.
REIGN OF TYRANTS
Tony and I got there too late to catch Army of Drunks' set, and gear load-in kept me distracted from Last Stage of Decay. All I had left to do was put my drum kit together off to the side of the stage, so Reign of Tyrants had my semi-divided attention. Admittedly, most of my focus was centered on that sweet-ass drum kit they brought onstage. Cymbals galore, a stuffed Animal (the Muppet) perched on the center stand, and Octobons! The man wielding the sticks was a play-for-the-song sort who played thrashy, occasionally blasty beats to match the riffs, but every now and then he cut loose with a crazy fill that raced up and down those tubular toms and the standard rack toms. Excellent! The vocalist was very animated but his voice is an acquired taste that reminded me of Proscriptor on Tara: higher in pitch yet still very throaty and a little gargly. If that makes any sense at all.
Come to think of it, I wonder if the band was influenced by Absu, because like the legendary Texas black/thrashers, Reign of Tyrants' songwriting is no joke, amigo. Most of their tunes exceed the five-minute mark, containing the standard three verses and choruses but having many different tempo shifts, off-the-wall riffs, and spidery solos between and around them. Two songs stick out in my mind, to which I have the titles thanks to patient YouTube research: "Mortal Sufferstream," which I at first thought was a cover of Voivod's "Tribal Convictions" because of its beginning drum beat (I bet they get that a lot); and "Sinister Realms," which has a chorus that slightly resembles "Highland Tyrant Attack" (you know, the part that goes "HIGH-LAND-A-TY-RANT-AT-TACK!"). By the time the last chorus came around, I had all my bandmates singing along, albeit with the Absu lyrics.
HEXLUST
Things did not begin optimistically for us. Tony plugged in his amp, flipped it on, and his effects loop immediately died. Zero signal. At some points during our actual set, both of his guitars went out of tune, one after the other. I was actually happy for the lapses this caused, as my double pedal was giving me some strange issues. Throughout "FBF" and "Toxic High," I felt the main pedal start to wobble, a sure sign of its grip on the lip of the kick drum coming loose. After multiple inspections, I found that the problem wasn't the grip on the lip, but that the spikes holding the pedal to the carpet were set to different lengths. A quick adjustment and I was good for the rest of the show.
After those minor hiccups, we actually had a great set. Tony took his technical issues in stride and remained outgoing and charismatic throughout the whole show, as opposed to losing his balls and hiding behind his hair as he used to do in the face of equipment SNAFUs. Tarzan had told me that he and JT had been practicing together lately, and it showed in their playing. Not that I could hear them very well; I had neglected to bring earplugs onstage, so all the amps were putting out fuzzy fart noises so far as I could tell. Despite that, I could feel the vibrations of Tarzan's bass better than I could hear it, and JT's tone cut through a little better when he soloed, and they both felt/sounded focused and confident.
"Sodomy and Lust" went exactly as I thought it would, with me not even thinking about what I was playing, just going with the flow of pure memory. I occasionally slipped up on a fill but nailed all the right beats and tempo changes, including our big slow-down right before the "Madness... crime... disgrace..." breakdown. As we always did when we played this song, we held that last chord out after the word "kill," I counted off, and came flying in just as fast as I could possibly play, casting out a small wish that the guys could still keep up with me. Lightning solos, big fill going back into the last verse (which I messed up), final chorus, big finish. Crowd loved it, and we were happy. Show well played, let's pack it in, I can barely lift my arms anymore and am well dehydrated because I'm stupid and left my water in Tony's truck.
One small thing...
We had made a last-minute decision to leave out "Meganecropolis" because, well, that song's hard and we didn't feel like playing it. What we wound up with, however, was a gap in our set we didn't realize existed until after we finished "S&L" and the sound guy told us we still had time for one more song. What could we possibly play that wouldn't kill us? We had just finished going fuck-you fast (as JT likes to call it) during the Sodom cover and were running on fumes. "Mega" was out of the question, as was our stupid-technical speedfest "Imminent Retardation." Thankfully, we still had a cover that fit perfectly: "Troops of Doom." Another warhorse from all the way back to our first show, the song is only speedy for a third of its running time, and even that's broken up into little chunks. We pulled it off with no thought and little effort, and trudged offstage to cry ourselves to death.
Set List:
FBF
Toxic High
They Conjure
Hellhammer
Tombs of the Blind Dead
Sodomy and Lust
Troops of Doom
WEAPÖNIZER
After loading all the gear back into Tony's truck, I took a long moment to breathe in some fresh air and tag-team my bottle of water with the similarly-parched JT. I was soon enticed back inside, however, by one of the ugliest, most evil guitar tones I've heard in a good while (and yes, I meant that in a very good way), the signal that Weapönizer had begun their black/crust/thrash assault on everyone left crammed into the Korova's basement venue. How to describe them to you folks? If you've heard Midnight or Vomitor, these guys are very similar, only faster and... dirtier. High-speed drumming, with lots of blast beats, combined with guitar playing that's fast without going into tremolo picking, lots of chugging palm-muted riffs and held-out chords, the riffs more strummed than picked most of the time. Way high on the Hellhammer/old Celtic Frost, Motörhead, and Venom influence.
Speaking of Venom, after bashing the audience in the teeth with their iron-knuckle originals, bassist/vocalist Barbarian announced a cover of the classic "In League With Satan," and drummer Shaggy immediately got heads banging and fists pumping with that distinctive tom beat. Towering guitarist Ale Wülf then called out a Hexlust cover, bringing a quick chuckle from the audience as they launched into their own rendition of "Sodomy and Lust" and we in Hexlust all joined the surge at the front of the stage to enjoy the song from the other side of the mic for once. We marveled at how their other guitarist Nuke was playing so fast, with such intensity, yet with a laid-back, confident stage presence. By comparison, our heads pretty much match our hands; the faster we play, the faster our necks snap. That's probably how we end up feeling as if we got hit by a bag of trains (whole bag, all at once) by the end of every show. Getting back to the shared cover, I'd say our version of that most recognizable of Sodom songs is faster, while theirs is by far more grinding and menacing.
Weapönizer closed out the evening with "Warbastard," and I almost lost my mind when they got to the end and Shaggy started slamming his snare drum in lock-step with the palm-muted chugs. They could have gone on doing that for five whole minutes and I never would have tired of it. Fantastic band all around, some true-blue intense black/thrash combined with a genuinely intimidating one percenter biker-type physical presence. Talking to them after the show, the idea was thrown out that we should head up to their home state of Colorado to play a show or two with them someday. Tony has family up near the Denver area; could this be where Hexlust finally plays an out-of-state show? A potential link in a possible touring chain? Time will tell.
Although knowing us and how good we are at this whole ambition thing... nope.
POST-SHOW THOUGHTS
Speaking of touring, how the hell do metal bands do that without completely destroying themselves? As I said earlier, we in Hexlust end every gig night with every muscle in our bodies screaming at us. We need the entire next day to recuperate, and even the day after that we're still not 100% crisp. We get up on that stage and throw every ounce of our energy into entertaining our audience, tossing chiropractic caution to the wind in favor of giving the paying customers a balls-out thrashfest. Not something we planned on doing, it just sort of happened naturally. We'd watch the headlining acts of the shows we played, some of them part of a touring package, and say "Yeah, the music's great, but the dudes themselves are kinda conservative with the metal-thrashing madness. They only really let loose in certain parts of the songs, and besides that they're all reigned in. Are they afraid of hurting themselves?" Now that I think about it, yeah they probably are!
Even when we say to each other, "Ok guys, tonight let's dial it back a notch. Reserve the headbanging for the really intense riffs, conserve energy, pace ourselves," that inevitably flies out the door. Two or three songs in we're playing as if it's the last tune of the last show we'll ever play. To be able to play every night for two weeks or more, we'd have to find some way to truly moderate our onstage energy, to dole out the thrashery based on the ebb and flow of the songs themselves. Would it be the same though? Would it still be hexcellent? Most of the praise we get has to do with our live shows, how we hit the ground running and don't even slow to a jog until we hit the finish or our feet fall off. I suppose the alternative would be to hire a yoga coach and a massage therapist to cram into a van with us and snap us back into place every night. Ideally, they'd have to be able to speak entirely in Simpsons quotes and put up with a constant tirade of dick and fart jokes.
Maybe we should just learn to dial it back. Or just never tour. Again, considering how we are with getting shit done... let's concentrate on playing these shows, then finishing an album. We'll see.
For this, our first of hopefully many shows in 2013, and our triumphant return to the Korova, we in Hexlust thank Weapönizer, Reign of Tyrants, Jaime for booking us and believing in us, the throng of crust kids who regarded us well, and the ever-supportive Beer, Hellbound Jeff, BJ, and Hellpreacher Johnny, who insist on coming to our shows and liking us in spite of our non-stop humdickery. See you all next time! Keep it hexcellent, and thrash til Alzheimers!
