Day Party Crawl

Deafheaven (Photo by Sandy Carson)

Brooklyn Vegan/Power Of The Riff Day Party

Brooklyn Vegan and other sponsors threw a metal and hardcore party at the Scoot Inn, a gathering for those not afraid of having their beers spilled. Starting inside were Dead in the Dirt, an Atlanta band who knew exactly two speeds (slow and fast) but had only mastered one dark mood, while the following act, Balaclava from Richmond, Va., played thrash with intermittent flurries of stop-go, progressive heaviness, and even flirted with doom. Ceremony is a young band who played outside to an outpouring of shredded throats and stage-diving and by visual aesthetic alone paid tribute to all the stages of punk: glam, short-cropped hardcore, and Nineties crust. The pitch was raised inside with Full of Hell, who played to a smaller but even more fever-pitched crowd. Vocalist Dylan Walker barely stepped onstage, spending most of his time being swallowed up and nearly carried by a small band of raucous true believers. Outside again Trash Talk whipped up an impressive if familiar din of noisy fuel for the mosh pit, but it was Deafheaven and lead singer George Clarke's grasp of the potential of a wantonly sexual build and release of the black metal formula that remains most memorable.