Banging on the Tomb Door

A Storm of Light: Drummer B.J. Graves and guitarist/vocalist Josh Graham stare into the fire at Red 7 (by Richard Whittaker)

Considering the number of practitioners it has attracted, there still does not seem to a suitable descriptor for the current wave of super-heavy, super-slow, super-precise bands. Post-rock is not quite right, post-metal seems dismissive, and downtuned is too broad a term. Doom jazz, anyone?

Not that quickfire grinders Kill the Client fit neatly into last Friday's night of low-gear epics at Red 7. "We're kind of the turd in the punch bowl," admitted tattooed screamer Champ Morgan. Their overdriven hardcore was a lightning bolt change of pace from the psychedelic-tinged experimentation of Austin quartet Skycrawler, but both shared to-the-micron precision of the sludgier Tombs.

Last time the Brooklyn trio passed through Austin, they rattled teeth in the closing hours of SXSW. Earlier that afternoon, they'd blasted through a teaser set, crammed onto the stage at Waterloo Records. Guitarist Mike Hill had to perch his pedals hanging over the steps, walking to and fro between guttural roars, while drummer (and Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia look-a-like) Andrew Hernandez said he had to work around the size restrictions of the miniature stage, pulling in his arms on some of the more complex fills. It was still an apocalyptic set, but this was just the first opening of the seals compared to the dead earth roar of their nighttime cataclysm.

Taking to the stage just as Explosions in the Sky was finishing up its set at the Moody Theater, Tombs deployed a similar spaciousness to more sinister effect. Flourishing beyond the machine gun syncopation of his old NYC grindcore crew ASRA, Hernandez hammered through the mathematically impossible time signatures of "Vermillion," the dust-storm centerpiece of new release Path of Totality, produced, through raw coincidence, by Explosions producer John Congleton.

If Tombs are the sound of a world cracked and broken, then A Storm of Light is the fire that scorched it. Longtime Neurosis collaborator Josh Graham would probably not flinch at the obvious Godflesh comparisons: After all, his old band/emotional maelstrom Battle of Mice did a split with Justin Broadrick's epoch-defining noise machine. The latest inhabitant of Storm's revolving drum stool (four incumbents in three albums and a split EP), B.J. Graves locked in with former Tombs bassist Domenic Seita to invoke a funereal tribalism. More pounding and hypnotic live than on its latest studio incarnation, As the Valley of Death Becomes Us, Our Silver Memories Fade, Graham's storm successfully traded subtlety for scale.