Happy birthday, Kyle!
The bass player for opening act Swamphead celebrated his birthday Thursday while onstage at Somergloom, the four-day “heavy” music jamboree at Deep Cuts and Crystal Ballroom, that dropped decibels by the thousands on last weekend’s dog days heatwave.
Or rather, his bandmates celebrated for him, wishing Kyle good tidings through the house PA while he broadcast a sheepish grin to the rolling sea of black T-shirts in front of him, emblazoned with band names written in inscrutable script, not meant to be read so much as deciphered.
Swamphead plays a variant of metal known as, perhaps unsurprisingly, swamp metal. Slow to medium tempo, heavily distorted, larded with grunting vocals, buoyed by a bluesy underbelly. The uninitiated might confuse it with doom metal or sludge metal. But the uninitiated were in short supply at Somergloom. The festival, now in its sixth year, has evolved into a late summer staple, drawing legions of career metalhead rank and file, along with the kind of people who don’t have breezy houses on the Cape to run away to during the most brutal weeks of late July and early August and who appreciate a good $8 wings and beer deal at a venue with ample air conditioning.
Dropdead, a hardcore outfit out of Providence, capped a Friday evening at Crystal Ballroom that trended punk. Is punk gloomy? It depends how you slice it. There’s certainly a sort of bleakness in the outlook, which recognizes a world riven with power imbalances, exploitation and tyrannies of all shapes and sizes.
Rather than luxuriate in the fantasy aesthetics of domination, though, like some types of metal, the three- and four-chord progressions of punk rock take pleasure in pointing out the social and political hypocrisies that surround us. Punk finds the “Look! See? I told you!” a source of eternal gratification.
Dropdead called out a litany of transgressions between songs, and reminded the room that the underground music scene was at least one opportunity to create a community that doesn’t reproduce the grotesque inequalities of the wider world.
In speech and song, the opening bands, from agit punkers Unhinged and queercore KO Queen to the horror show weirdness of Miracle Blood, echoed the headliner’s sentiment to the righteous approval of the audience. The mosh pit, churning all night, got only a brief reprieve when a fire alarm sounded (reportedly caused by a Mr. Crepe baking project gone awry downstairs) during Severed Boy’s set, evacuating the building, as Davis Square filled up with punks on a smoke break or looking for a quick slice of pizza.
Local postrockers Junius showcased its latest album “Sotera” in the headlining slot Saturday at Crystal Ballroom. What’s “postrock”? How about a proggy Pink Floyd meets metal? That might be too pat of an equation, but it does indicate the intersecting lines of spaciness and heaviness that the subgenre can produce.
Saturday’s Somergloom delivered postrock in spades, though there was an interesting curatorial pitch in the arc of the lineup. The first two acts, the doomy metal Gloomlurker and the throwback grunge outfit Ballast, set the table with rock ’n’ roll variations. It was as if the bill was getting a running start, picking up speed, balling up its courage, before taking the leap into a Grand Canyon of spacier sounds.
What followed was the “post”-ing of postrock, the ascendence of the genre into its afterlife, characterized chiefly in Hiroe’s set by the quality of instrumental pastiche, which cuts across stylistic boundaries to create a propulsive, quasisymphonic tone poem that belongs to all rock genres and none. It’s bracing stuff, but comes across as a little academic and destined for a musty shelf. The Mahavishnu Orchestra was a heavyweight instrumental outfit that really blew people’s minds with their exotic compositions in the ’70s, but how many kids are wearing those T-shirts today?
(Brief aside: Mahavishnu Orchestra T-shirts, a tremendous business opportunity for bootleggers. Is this the Mahavishnu Orchestra website? It looks terrible, like the Internet stopped evolving in 1998. And there’s no “Merch” link …)
Junius and Pennsylvania’s Planning For Burial (which, oddly enough, sounded like a goth War On Drugs) took a step back from the extreme fringe of the pure instrumental, sowing its sonic fields with lyrics here and there. There are times when nothing is more profound than the flood of notes cascading from the neck of a guitar. There are other times it’s nice to hang your hat on a few stanzas of lyrics, whispered, grunted or growled – maybe even wholly incomprehensible – because it at least suggests you’re trying to communicate with your human words, which counts for something in a live performance environment where building a connection between artist and audience is paramount.
Four days of Somergloom is a lot of music. It’s a lot of photos, too. Some of the photographers with a light step at the lip of the stage on the first night looked like they had been through a car wash without a car by the end of the fourth. I’ve wondered in other articles about other local music festivals whether four days hits or exceeds the limit of what a local music scene can sustain before the unity of its central theme starts to waver. I wonder the same thing about Somergloom.
The festival raises the flag of “heavy music.” I’m a music junkie who regularly attends four- or five-act bills, made up of bands I’ve never heard of, all playing different types of music. I’m ready for anything and don’t need a unifying musical thematic to get off the couch. But if you’re one of those normal types of people, which I’m told exist somewhere, who floss every night and worry about where to invest their excess earnings, you might be reminded of that old Yeats line, “the centre cannot hold.”
The final night at Deep Cuts was like a madcap roll of Yahtzee dice. Hemlok opened with a set of deep psych fantasia. Spirit Hotel hovered in hazy, gazey atmospheres. GUHTS (which my editor will inevitably restyle as “Guhts,” unless I insert this parenthetical as a brilliant, preemptive strategical move to make the edit nonsensical) delivered an art punk body blow. And Eight Foot Manchild, self-described as the world’s first “doombrass” band, sent us all off with Honk!-style rendition of metal, sprinkled with a few unreleased numbers from their forthcoming album.
Whatever the dream of “heavy music” was that held us all spellbound for four nights, we were starting to come to our senses like Dorothy emerging from a fever dream to find herself in a black and white bed somewhere in Kansas. “There’s no place like home …” Were we home all along, surrounded by local bands that we might catch in a local club any night of the year? Maybe “heavy music” is just a dream that lives somewhere over the rainbow. But for a few days in August, when the humidity and heat swell our brains to bursting, we will gladly accept the twister-fueled ascension into the air-conditioned halls of the Emerald City and take a seat with the Wizard at our left, the Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion to our right, and a Munchkin with no union protection, health care benefits nor retirement plan refilling our glass of mead as fast as we empty it. “There’s no place like Gloom …”
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