Timmy Hefner laid on me a perfect wedding present: Church of Misery headlining Chaos in Tejas at the onset of June. Five days later, my would-be spouse and I caught the Japanese doom merchants in San Francisco, which resulted in us getting our marriage license there. So when the local booker mentioned Thursday’s Southern Lord bill at Red 7, I paid heed.
Representing earlier this year at South by Southwest, the Los Angeles distributor of all sounds metal-borne and bound drops a bill right out of Chaos in Tejas at a headquarters for the unparalleled local festival. Red 7 won’t need to apply any corpse paint to scare up screams of the ultra violent.
You can sample the bill – Black Breath, Martyrdöd, Burning Love, Enabler, and Powertrip – here, and in so doing, this newly banded metal head discovered the two headliners. Seattle’s Black Breath exhales a blackened thrash (“Mother Abyss”) that’ll have me at its merch table buying March’s Sentenced to Life. The rototill hammer of 2006 demo “Christians in Hell” then summons Swedish death metal landmark Entombed.
Better still, Entombed countrymen Martyrdöd – on its maiden American tour – pummel an equally ripping death metal, more bottom heavy than but equally rabid to Finnish puncture wound Rotten Sound, whose frontman Keijo Niinimaa went Nasum on Chaos in Tejas the night before Church of Misery.
Toronto big rock quintet Burning Love revs some Turbonegro, Milwaukee metalcore crew Enabler drop Southern Lord debut All Hail the Void next month, and Dallas speed metal freaks Power Trip round out Thursday’s rites in following up their Chaos frenzy. When does Austin get its own metal festival?
If Timmy Heffner ever ties the knot, I owe him one helluva nuptials offering….
This article appears in June 22 • 2012.
