"People are going to be arrested," my cab driver said.
He was taking me to the 10th annual New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, so I couldn't help but agree. The drunken metalheads wandering around Worcester, Mass., would undoubtedly be causing trouble.
This was my first time in Worcester, so I didn't know what to expect. I had heard a lot of bad things about the town, but I tried to keep an open mind. Unfortunately, as my Greyhound bus rolled into the station, it seemed the hearsay was rather accurate. I was greeted by an abandoned scrap metal merchant and further down the street saw a dilapidated mall next door to a McDonald's with a prostitute standing out front, staring lasciviously at passing motorists.
My cab driver, on the other hand, was a Jamaican evangelical who played a homemade cassette tape of a fervent evangelist preacher at full volume during our ride. He must have drawn the connection between me and the crowd of people in concert T-shirts who had been milling around the Palladium for the past few days -- something roughly connected to Satan.
I finally arrived at the club in time to catch Monstrosity, a death metal outfit with a very solid approach to the genre. They managed to put on an engaging show despite the early showtime.The crowd was responsive, so they got a little carried away and went over their time-slot. Mid-song, while one of their guitarists was in the midst of a brilliant guitar riff, a couple of teamsters began to take down the stage props. The bewildered, drunken frontman whirled around, stared in disbelief and finally began to yell at the venue's staff. As a symbolic gesture of his wrath he emptied all the water and soda bottles on the stage, while asking the crowd for encouragement. We were happy to oblige.
The next band was Skeletonwitch, who played an excellent set, full of catchy head-banging riffs. The real highlight was the vocal work, which was truly amazing. Think a high-pitched, growled howl -- it was unearthly.
These bands were followed by hours of metalcore -- music derived from metal and hardcore. Hardcore, as it is known today, evolved from hardcore punk, a genre characterized by its emphasis on simple, aggressive and fast song structure. Metal, in contrast, tends to have a more intricately composed sound with more emphasis on neoclassical song structures with occasional blues influences. A good rule of thumb for identifying metalcore is the vocals. If the vocalist is screaming into the microphone as if he's being physically tortured, it's most likely metalcore.
When it comes to live music, you can always tell a metalcore band by how the frontman addresses the audience. The frontman for As Blood Runs Black pleaded for the attendees to start a mosh pit. They complied, but it turned into nothing more than a couple of pasty, overweight teenagers walking in circles, shirtless, doing their best to look belligerent.
I came to see two thrash metal bands in particular -- Overkill and Municipal Waste. I ended up seeing neither. When Overkill canceled at the last moment, the concert organizers decided to change the schedule without any announcement to the audience. Now, that would not have been too bad if there weren't two stages -- one on the first floor, the other on the second. They switched bands around from one stage to the other without informing anyone, resulting in widespread disgruntlement among concert-goers.
You would think this would be the part where the arrests occurred, but everyone greeted the news with apathy. To be fair, thrash metal is a genre whose fanbase, in the words of the classic German thrash band, Tankard, "is comprised of fat dudes with smelly vests on" -- but few people fit that description at the concert. Even the two "fat dudes" in "smelly" jean vests and Overkill T-shirts standing behind me took the scheduling change with dour ennui.
My cab driver could not have been more wrong about the aftermath of the festival. The modern metalhead is not as raucous as his earlier counterpart from the '80s or even the '90s. Not even close. And though bands like Vital Remains, Kataklysm and Behemoth put on excellent shows, I left the club feeling unfulfilled. The casual nature of today's metal listener is somewhat incongruous with his dedicated outside appearance -- the piercings, the tattoos, the macabre band T-shirts. He still doesn't even seem to care.
