On April 26th it all went down at our 2nd Anniversary show that featured some of the most amazing bands in California. Honestly, the event was a huge success with truck loads of positive energy. All of the bands performed to the highest levels of gnarlyness and you could hear their passion in every note! Just as important as the bands that took the stage, CVLT Nation would like to salute everyone who came out and showed support. We would like to shout out Gehenna, Seven Sisters of Sleep, Youth Code, Children of God, Stoic Violence, Whip Hand and Unit B for an awesome fucking night. The night’s festivities were caught on film by our comrade in photography Adam Murray – good looking out homie! Without Crash the Clubs and Lace Pickups we would not have been able to pull this off, thank you for you support and hard work. It was cool to be able to connect with people outside of the internet. That being said, we really appreciate everyone who makes this webzine a destination every day! Now it’s time for the pictures to do the talking – check out these unreal flicks from CVLT Nation’s 2nd Anniversary and SSOS record release party (they fucking killed it – make sure to check them out on their upcoming tour with Full of Hell).

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Lo! Tour Diary Part 1 by Adrian Shapiro

Howdy, Lo! here checking in from Europe. We’re 12 shows into the tour and currently driving to Rome, Italy for our show tonight. Here’s a bit of a breakdown of the last few days and our journey through to this point.

Day 1.
We arrive in Zurich after that fun flight from Sydney, got through customs and were met by a chap from the van company to give us our van for the next month and all our backline. We then jumped in the van and headed off to La Chaux De Fond where we’re setting up for the next couple of days to rehearse and catch up before we start playing. Driving on the wrong side of the road in a manual definitely took a bit of time to get used to. Four hours later and a nice drive through some snowy areas and we’re there. We’re staying with a couple of the guys from The Ocean so we headed back to theirs and crashed for the night. We toured with The Ocean in Australia in 2012 and it was great to see the guys.

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Text and photos: Astrid Tonella

On this sunny beginning of May started the second edition of Heavy Days in Doomtown in Copenhagen, Denmark. The four days DIY sludge/doom/stoner fest who made a massive impression last year is back again, with an incredible line up (five bands performed their first European show ever), bringing fans of “all things slow and heavy” from all over Europe and beyond. For those who are unfamiliar with the festival (?!), HDDT is an event organized by the “Undergrundsmusikkens Fremme” (Underground music Promotion) who has been organizing for several years the now notorious “Kill-town Death Fest”. The concept, which makes this festival so unique, is to bring the DIY principles to the doom/stoner/sludge/psych scenes that are rarely exposed to these ethics and create music and culture without having any profit involved.

Huge congrats to the organizing crew for topping last year’s event, for the top-notch organization and for making this weekend absolutely amazing. With this edition, HDDT really proved that it can compete with other renewed European festivals – so if you haven’t attended yet, this is definitely not the fest you want to miss next year!

DAY ONE
The first day started off very well at Stengade, with a sold out warm-up show enabling the public to visit the art gallery placed on the first floor of the venue. For this edition, HDDT continued in line of last year, adding even more artists to the bill. The artistic dimension is to me a great addition that provides a very unique atmosphere to this festival and showcases artists who also contribute in making the scene something more than “just” music but a culture of its own. For this day, you were able to admire the incredible works of The 13th Sign Collective (D), responsible for the fest’s artwork, Manuel Tinnemans (NL), Timo Ketola (SWE), Sami Hynninen (FIN) and assist to a book reading by Ulrike Serowy, narrated by Mat McNervey from Hexvessel.

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Earlier this year, the Oakland community squat space Hot Mess/RCA won the first of its legal battles against the developers trying to evict them from the property, a pioneer case for squatters’ rights in the US. While their order of eviction was overturned, they will have many fights ahead of them in a system that sees squatting as a dangerous illegal activity, one that impedes on the capitalization of property by banks and speculators. It seems like most of the time, the authorities that be would rather see their citizens homeless in order to line their pockets with money from developers. However, in California the law of “adverse possession” creates guidelines for squatters and makes it possible for them to own the property the are squatting after 5 years of paying property tax and living openly on it. That’s how Steve DeCaprio, from the band Embers and CEO and founder of the non-profit Land Action, took legal possession of his own home, and in March he was interviewed on CNN about squatting and squatter’s rights in California. He did a great job of presenting a responsible face for squatting, showing that the fears that drive the evictions of squatters are unwarranted in many cases. In fact, it seems like many of these evictions are more driven by profit than by public safety. Personally, I find it “morally yucky” that banks in California have foreclosed on hundreds of thousands of homes after manipulating families into shady mortgages and taking in billions of taxpayer dollars as a bailout. Taking possession of an abandoned property and restoring it seems like a better way to go for the neighborhood, community and country at large. Check out the CNN segment with Steve as well as an Oakland squat photo essay below.

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Since Day One of CVLT Nation, I have been blown away by the talent of so many young bands coming out today. Some of these have stood out to me from the first second I heard their music, and Young and in the Way is one of these bands! So I can’t tell you how happy I was when I found out that YAITW’s upcoming full length When Life Comes to Death is going to be released on Deathwish Inc.! These blackened crust warriors have worked hard to create and share sick fucking music with the world, so it’s perfect to see them getting the recognition they deserve. Stay tuned for more from YAITW and CVLT Nation soon…

Whatever Ghost BC is doing, they seem to be excelling at it. I can’t say I’m a fan, but this show was sold out weeks in advance. The venue, not small by any means, was packed full of smiling fans singing along. The merch line was no less than 90 people long until everyone had a thirty dollar shirt and an LP in their hands. Those LPs sold out not more than a week or so into tour. I’m sure the dildos will sell out too, if they haven’t already. Now, I could attempt to delve into the Ghost spectacle, hypothesize the mystery, who/why and so on, but I think there’s been enough of that circulating already so I won’t bore you with more of it here. On with the show…

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So much good music came out in 1984 it was hard to keep track. One record that touched my life maybe more than any other was The Cult’s Dreamtime. In my book, this might be the best album the band ever created – all of the elements were on point! During this time, me and all of my friends thought this band could do no wrong and that they represented what we were going through. The other day I found a full video of their gig at the Lyceum in 1984. As you will see, The Cult were at the top of their game then… So let’s all have our dreamtime and check out this awesome blast from the past!

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At CVLT Nation HQ, we will be celebrating the 420 weekend, so we thought we should spread the joy! All our clothing and hats will be 30% off starting today until Monday the 22nd with code 420WEEKEND! Plus, every order placed during the sale will get a FREE pin pack! As if it couldn’t get any better, all domestic orders over $75 ship for free, and all International orders over $150 ship free. So spark one up (or don’t) and get yourself some new threads from the CVLT Store!

Well, the first stop on the tour technically is April 22nd in Minneapolis but this is their last local show for a bit; at least until their show in support of Ahna’s tour of Canada in May.

Anyway I was one of quite a few people sending off island grinders Six Brew Bantha this past Saturday night, they’re embarking on a “mid west/east coast (ish)” tour right now and hitting up a bunch of spots they missed last time, so they threw one last show on this side of the border, in a basement with friends supporting them: SHITLIVER, Griefer, and Bungus.

There were a few shows that Six Brew Bantha played (with a bunch of wicked local grind acts) when I got back to the west coast but I just wasn’t aware of them, so I was pretty stoked when I heard they were playing with some new grind locals and the resident death industrial titan Griefer not too far away. Plus Six Brew Bantha just recently laid down two new splits with New York’s Water Torture and Minneapolis’ Agitate and got some pressed in time for their tour, so I was able to witness them laying waste to a tiny basement with their latest designs and it was as brutal as you’d expect.

Make the jump for some videos and photos…

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Text & Photos by Matthew Grant Anson

Sundays are weird days for shows – they bring out a strange hodgepodge of people who either don’t have work or school the next day or do but don’t care. Combine that with King Dude’s already peculiar fanbase, and you had the perfect recipe of strangeness at Los Angeles’ The Echo Sunday, March 31st. King Dude, accompanied by Of The Wand & The Moon and A Story of Rats brought the tunes to match, together providing a unique and off-the-wall combination of neo-folk, drone, and everything in between.

A Story of Rats began the proceedings with ten lit candles, distorted vocals, driving drums, and bwwoooonnnggggg-ing bass feedback. This amounted to their entire set…they either played one long song or multiple songs with no breaks in between; it was hard to tell. The audience for the most part didn’t know what to make of the act, so far removed from King Dude’s sound they were. A Story of Rats had at least five build ups where it seemed as if the music was about to crescendo and transform into something, only to peter out into nothingness like a 4th of July bottle rocket that’s reached the apex of its flight. Drone music isn’t for the faint of heart, and it takes a particularly warped mind to appreciate the intricacies that are (probably, hopefully) hidden beneath the repetition and the feedback. Needless to say, that type of audience just wasn’t at The Echo that night.

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