Photos & Text by Charles Nickles
It’s been two days and my head’s still a flurry of shadows and whiskey and violence; and I suppose that should trouble me, and I suppose that it does, and I’m not all that sure what to make of the man I’ve woken up to today, but I know he’s seen a new horror and I know that will change me.
But, perhaps now’s not the time to delve too deep into my revelatory disassociation.
Maybe I should just tell y’all motherfuckers about the best goddamn slab of hellfire to break through Brooklyn’s fourth wall in a mongrel’s age.
Well, Churchburn didn’t show up. Their van went to shit, I heard say, somewhere en route to BK; which is a shame, because their bleak sludge vitals would’ve been a perfect hors d’oeuvre to the night’s blackened blood stain.
So Cult Leader opened the evening, and they were assured in their pain. Crustier than I anticipated, like rubbing fresh wounds in the Great Salt Lake. They played longer, deeper and meaner than some of their Death Wish brethren, but their hardcore pedigree made its name evident as their set played out in weathered rages and periodic splints of legitimate melody.
CULT LEADER
Primitive Man played next, and though many of their friends and fans, present, testified (over High Lifes) to their human kindness, I found it difficult to view them as anything other than the Monolith made flesh on the strength of spectral rage. They’re just so fucking heavy. So torturous. So willfully unforgiving of their knot in the ontological chain, it’s a wonder they didn’t implode under their own sonic weight.
PRIMITIVE MAN
And then there was Dragged into Sunlight and HOLY SHIT! That’s it. That’s all I could say for a good ten minutes after their set. “HOLY SHIT!” “HOLY SHIT!” to anyone who would listen, in messages to my friends who missed the set, to my girlfriend who wanted nothing to do with the nightmare I described days and weeks in advance of this gig but supported my desire to get damaged and terrified. “HOLY SHIT!” It’s difficult to describe their effort without sounding like a amphetamine-clean schizophrenic spying Christ in his wall-splattered semen. They are less a band than a force, miserably unpleasant on record but positively transformative in a live setting. They are the abyss incarnate. Think the sun death beatific of The Flaming Lips egomaniacal psychedelia inversed, upturned and run rabid with contempt as the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv. A revolution of illness played out in pitch. A clarion call to the faithless to rise up and greet the many-splendored horror of the infinite.
DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT
