Job For A Cowboy, Skeletonwitch, and Misery Index
Sunday, December 19 at The Canal Club
I love death metal shows. Cigarettes. Beer. Shots. Skanks. Leather. Chains. Those things are all present at other metal shows, but Death Metal shows are a different animal than straightforward middle-finger-in-the-air metal shows I’ve been to. For starters, Death Metal shows are almost comical. Some ding-dong is on stage with a microphone talking to the crowd in his go-to aggresive voice, yet when announcing the next song, Dr. Claw crawls out of his throat and shouts something like “The name of this song is ‘Auschwitz Breath'" or “Rip Out Your Eyes with My Tongue.” Usually I can’t understand what the song title is, and I happily don’t care. Then I pop a lozenge.
Secondly, the lyrical content for Death Metal bands seems to be a bit less high-brow then going to see, say, Eyehategod or Acid Bath in their prime. There aren’t a lot of academics who flock to see Six Feet Under or Deicide or Cannibal Corpse. It’s a lot easier to see myself having a Tom Cruise/Jerry McGuire moment (slapping my hand on the steering-wheel, singing with the windows up) with a Dax Riggs song as opposed to a song about raping a cherub with my bloody skeleton dick. That’s not meant to be a criticism; it’s just a fact.
Also, it’s not a prerequisite to know the lyrics to any of the songs by any of the bands. There are people at the show who know some or even all of the lyrics to every song, but it’s definitely not a requirement. Lot’s of other shows aren’t like that. For instance, I’d feel completely out of place seeing Taking Back Sunday. People who go to emo shows love those bands and spend the majority of the evening outsinging each other, making anyone outside of the circle feel out of place. It's like going with your mom to a Josh Groban concert (read: concert, not show). You and everyone else knows you’re not supposed to be there. Unless, of course, Josh Groban is your thing. Needless to say, I was stoked to go to the Canal Club for this show. Even moreso not to have memorized any of the bands’ lyrics beforehand. Shit, I didn’t even know any of the song titles. I just wanted to bang my head, and that’s exactly what I did.
I was glad the Death Metal was upstairs instead of downstairs, because I didn’t have to crane my neck around fat heads to get a peek at the band playing pretty much on the floor. However, it could’ve been held downstairs because the audience was a lot thinner than I had anticipated. Who cares, though, right? An intimate evening with a band is sometimes a lot more entertaining than one with a full capacity crowd (I realize “intimate” sounds out of place at a Death Metal show. Words like “intimate” usually pertains to an evening with Dwight Yokam at the Birchmere. But for all intents and purposes…).
Misery Index had, by far, the best sound of the night. Their set was pummeling. I enjoyed the shit out of every song they played. I’d always heard from people that Misery Index was badass and they absolutely lived up to the hype I’ve heard for a few years. For me, Misery Index was always the band I’d meant to check out but had always forgotten. Usually it was due to the record-store-brain-fart that happens to most people who don’t have a specific CD they want to buy. I hate it when that happens. Their set didn’t have too much of that in-between song banter, which is just a bunch of shit I usually tune out anyway. I prefer silence instead, unless it’s a sold out show where the entire venue is electrified. Then I want the band to act like a bunch of fucking maniacs.
Skeletonwitch took the stage next and were….good. I enjoyed the songs. I enjoyed the frontman telling me to “drink beer and smoke weed,” and I liked the fact that he looked like the long-haired guy from The Devil’s Rejects. Skeletonwitch looked the part, they sounded the part, they were the part in every sense of the word. But they couldn’t compete with Misery Index’s heaviness. I don’t mean to be insulting to this band, because I do like their music and I know they don’t slack on doing a killer show. I saw them with Danzig and Dimmu Borgir and liked them. I heard their first album, Beyond the Permafrost, and I liked it, too. But playing after Misery Index made them sound like a tin can. A monkey with an organ-grinder. Blame it on the sound guy or whomever you want, but there wasn’t a comparison.
Job for a Cowboy played last and were the band I’d come to see. I’d listened to them on-and-off for years and couldn’t think of a better way to spend my Sunday night then seeing this band with one of my best friends, who got me into them. As with the other bands, I didn’t know a single lyric and I barely recognized a few songs, but I could tell that this was not going to be their night. Their singer, Johnny Davey, announced after the first song that they were short a bass player (ouch), and that their van had broken down, so they were traveling in a rental. I have a bleeding heart for any band who has had any problems with their transportation. It’s a wrench in the gear of every meticulously timed departure and arrival of the tour. A fart in the face of every person who has busted their ass (no pun intended) to make the tour happen.
Their sound was... eh. The crowd was into it, but I was not, and I do not hold that against Job For A Cowboy. They just had a shitty night. If Skeletonwitch sounded like a tin, can then Job For A Cowboy sounded like someone crumbling a Doublemint wrapper in their sweaty palm. They were definitely the most high-profile band, and you could tell they are meant for bigger shows, not sweaty clubs. They are a festival/amphitheatre band, whereas Misery Index and Skeletonwitch are probably going to fair better in smaller venues. But on the 19th, Job For A Cowboy sounded like a flea-circus band.
During the course of the evening I watched the kids in the front row and in the back of the club flailing around and moshing--doing whatever they could to feel the music and be as close to the bands as possible. They were shouting lyrics. They were pointing fists and middle-fingers in the air. They were beating the shit out of each other. I remember when going to a show was the same for me. I remember being up front, dripping with a room full of other people’s sweat, barely conscious from the heat and loving every goddamned minute of it. I remember screaming my lungs out and seeing all of the red, sweaty faces that looked just like mine. Smiling along with all of them. Looking over my shoulder through the haze and seeing all the blurry, sullen faces on the outskirts, leaning against the walls of the club, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. I remember thinking “What the Hell are these lame bastards doing? They’re missing the entire show. Jesus, I don’t ever want to get old.”
December 19th allowed me to see that I have finally become one of the blurry outskirt faces. Besides going to take a piss, I stayed in the back of the club for the entire show. I watched those flailing kids and realized for the first time the change that had occurred in me. It was a poignant moment. It was a realization that a time in my life, a chapter in my book, was closed and would probably not be reopened. I was in the back because I didn’t want to be sweaty. I didn’t want to be shoved around. I didn’t want to be tired. I just wanted to stand there, nod my head, sip my beer and be left alone. Christ, I didn’t even get drunk. And all of that was sad. Unbeknownst to me, my priorities had become different than they used to be, and I was okay with that. I was okay with not having the same amount of fun that I was accustomed to. Don’t get me wrong, I had fun, I had a friggin’ blast, but it was a different kind of fun. The kind of fun that you become accustomed to having more and more as you get older. A fun that, in the eyes of the teenager I once was, is “boring.” And in that younger mindset, they’re right. Looking out at those kids, I realized that type of fun is over for me, and their time is just beginning.
I cross my fingers that they enjoy it for as long as they can. They go to every show they can afford and every show they are allowed out of the house to attend. They buy shirts and crowd surf and mosh and lose their voice and annoy people and put off growing up for as long as they possibly can. Because it won’t come back, or at least not in the same way. The palate of fun will change. It’s a gradual change that happens almost as subtly as an afternoon nap. And when it is realized, it will be okay but it will also be a little bit... well, I don’t know the word to explain it. It’s a feeling that’s a little too close to home to describe. Like a locust or a snake shedding its skin to a new beginning. I’m okay with allowing that skin to be discarded into the dirt, where it will fall apart and decompose, because I have had a blast. I have had my time. And I hope they have as much fucking fun as I had.