While I have plenty of love for gentler sounds, my musical forté is in the noisy, heavy, weird and dissonant. So naturally, I spent much of AthFest at the Caledonia Lounge, with a few notable forays elsewhere. Caledonia is a small place, and the crowd was on average much fewer, older, and grizzlier than, say, the outdoor stages. I arrived a little after 9, and could hear from across the lot that Guzik had already started. I previewed them recently here, so I’ll not dwell on their sound. Suffice to say that the doom metal outfit more than lived up to my expectations, beginning with a couple of deafeningly loud mid-tempo riff-fests that immediately drowned out the unpleasantly fresh memories of having overheard Reptar. Their third and final song began with a lengthy intro featuring moody, chorused guitar arpeggios played at a slow waltz. After a few minutes of this, the full band erupted in a monstrous droning chord as the raspy vocals came in shrieking overhead. They carried that out to its thunderous end, all the while transitioning through several more of their specialty: riffs which vary just enough from the previous one to keep things interesting, but never so much as to disrupt the groove.
The next band, Utah, felt like the personification (bandification?) of one of those riffs, a slight veer from the established template. They shared Guzik’s drummer and amps, and could reasonably be called doom metal. Only, unlike Guzik, they’re not nearly so dark and gloomy; the vocals are clean(ish), the chord progressions are catchy in a conventional, almost poppy fashion, and the tempos are much closer to rollicking. These middle-aged guys sound like they stopped listening to metal around the time of Master of Reality, only to latch onto it again with the likes of Torche and Black Tusk. Fun stuff.
Lazer/Wulf
Lazer/Wulf followed, and I stuck around for a couple of their songs. They continue to be a band I fail to get. Their speed and precision is impressive, but the songs just seem like a succession of average riffs that aren’t given time to develop before jumping to the next one, only broken up by the occasional wordless vocalization. They seem less influenced by any style of metal than by ADHD.
I pushed my way out through the sea of sweaty bodies and headed to Ciné to catch Tunabunny, who are as close to Lazer/Wulf’s opposite as one could hope for. They radiate willful amateurishness, from their cheap guitars and cheaper amps to their simple chord progressions to their unassuming appearances to their untrained vocals. And yet, they know how to write songs. There are hooks and dynamics and soaring choruses and harmonized tinny riffs and multiple vocal lines playing off one another, and more than that, there’s a reckless intensity to them that many more polished bands lack. It’s as if they’re trying to be a pop band, but their inherent weirdness keeps shoving its way out, manifesting in anguished, off-key howling over top bouncy bass lines, or in the way songs take sudden turns from charming to insistent while their fundamentals barely change, or when they stop everything for a three chord synth break, or—in Tunabunny tradition—they end the set with a meltdown, going from their catchiest guitar licks to frantically strumming the most dissonant single chord they can find, knocking around and tossing their gear in the process (the floor tom ended up on the bassist’s head). It’s hard to pinpoint references, and might be reductive to do so, but there’s a distinct 90s underground sensibility to both their sound and to how little of a fuck Tunabunny seem to give. (Can we say “fuck” in Flagpole? I am pretty sure this is a thing I have seen.) Here’s hoping they never do.
Savagist
I missed Hot Breath’s set waiting for pizza at Little Italy. Crowd-wise, it wasn’t the best time to go, but I wasn’t that bothered to skip what’s always seemed to be a repository for Clem Adams’ B-riffs. The A-riffs, of course, go to Savagist, who played next. Savagist are, to my mind, the best metal band in Athens, but it’s hard to say exactly what kind of metal band they are (aside from their chosen descriptor, “ruff rock,†which got a call-out tonight). There’s both thrash and sludge in their rhythms, which are hard-driving even at their mostly mid-tempos. They eschew solos entirely, much to their credit, and Adams’ vocals wouldn’t be out of place in a hardcore punk band. If they have a flaw, it’s that they’re at times too relentless, which led some of the songs in the first half of the set to blend together. Fortunately, this was more than rectified by the final three songs, which were mostly instrumental and were all the better for the shift in focus. In the middle of those was the blazing “Fire From Friction,” which stands as one of the best things to come out of any of the current crop of Georgia metal bands. Savagist’s closest sonic neighbor is probably Savannah’s Kylesa, and I would gladly put “Fire From Friction” up against anything that band has done. Naturally, it killed. But the song that followed was very nearly as impressive, suggesting a rich future for Savagist and bringing the first night of AthFest to a satisfying conclusion.
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