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“Sounds Of The Underground is a metal festival sweeping...”

★★★★☆

written by Hastur on 06/07/2005

Sounds Of The Underground is a metal festival sweeping our nation. On Thursday June 30th said festival made a stop in Winston-Salem NC and I was there to see it. Anticipation had been building in me for months, the tour boasted at least two bands that I had great desire to see. I had never been to a festival show before this one. Additionally I had only been to one other show in the south, so what follows is an account of why I must caution anyone without 200 bucks to waste from going to a festival show in the south, especially in Winston-Salem.

The venue SOTU chose was the Dixie classic fairgrounds. For those of you unfamiliar with the fairgrounds it is a thoroughly modern facility that has several permanent buildings and a large fenced off parking lot, all new construction that didn't look like it had seen more than a decade of weather and use. After looking around for a parking space for awhile we noticed that about 250 police officers had been given free passes to the show. When we did find parking it was six dollars but included a yellow piece of paper that detailed the many things that should be left behind when entering the fairgrounds. All your favourites were there with a couple of new additions like carabiners and water. I wondered if the police would be similarly limited.

Bear in mind that SOTU was billed as an event that started at noon and was running until two in the morning. Dixie classic fairgrounds, to me, sounded like an outdoor venue. So it was with a bit of foresight that my friend and I filled the cooler with ice and water, soda, food and yes even beer. The idea was that we would try to get in with everything we could carry and then dump what we had to and enter anyway. We got through with one contraband item, my usb camera.

It wasn't all bad though, the bands were not actually outside playing, there is an arena like structure at the fairgrounds that they used, and it was air conditioned. The merchandising tents were outside, that's where the bands were doing their meet and greets. Truthfully though, a heavy metal band meet and greet must be what waiting to see the king was like in the middle ages. There are a whole lot of fans waiting in a long, long line to drool compliments over the musicians and beg them to sign almost anything they are carrying or wearing, even flesh. I didn't see anyone with offerings for the bands, which would have fit with my meet the king analogy but there again the offerings probably had to be dumped at the gate. Come to think of it I did see what looked like spice cake discarded on the free side of the fence. Whatever happened to the good old days when all a teenage girl had to do was blow a roadie to meet the guy whose posters are wallpapering her bedroom?

With all that was going on outside the arena it wasn't easy to remember that there were bands actually playing music until someone opened the arena doors. When we got there the band onstage was Every Time I Die. I was thoroughly unimpressed by ETID and can say that the only word I understood while they were onstage was "god". I'm not sure which god they were referring to but they seemed like a decent bunch of chaps. The music itself was nothing I hadn't heard before from a host of other death metal bands.

Following ETID was Strapping Young Lad from Canada. They were the most progressive of any of the metal bands in the tour. Devin Townsend's voice came over the system brilliantly, most of what he said was obscene in one way or another yet still entertaining. He did warn the crowd at the beginning of the set that SYL represented the sex portion of the show, so when he made repeated screaming requests for the audience to satisfying him and his band mates orally, we were not surprised. I can only assume that he needed to make these requests onstage because of his rapidly retreating hairline. He probably had a hard time convincing young women backstage that he was in the band with the fluorescent house lights glaring off of his forehead. Still the music was excellent even the voice layering sounded good, even if it was obvious that some of the vocals were prerecorded.

After SYL the audience was treated to the hardcore stylings of Throwdown I can't tell you much about Throwdown beyond the fact that they are firmly entrenched in the Hardcore genre. A lot of grunting peaked by the occasional shout, my friend and I took the opportunity to visit the concession stand. We had been dreading the price but were left with few options, five dollar Budweiser's don't taste any better than their peers found much cheaper anywhere else. Eventually Throwdown left the stage and preparations were made for GWAR to take their rightful place.

If you have never seen GWAR perform it must be stated that it is as much a floorshow as a music performance. The band members have all created characters that they dress up as onstage. The faces of GWAR are gory and violent but in a lighthearted way. Picture Lewis Black without the cocaine-fuelled anger still complaining about stuff and you are somewhere in the realms of GWAR humor. Being a long time fan of GWAR I was familiar with their antics, so when a stage hand dressed up as the latest pope got onstage I knew I was in for a treat. His robes were decorated with Nazi regalia while his gestures came straight from a third reich propaganda film. GWAR, of course, cut him open and sprayed his vital fluids all over the crowd. The dismemberment continued as GWAR played songs from some of their earliest albums including "The Salaminizer", "Crack in the egg" and "Sick of you". After hosing down the crowd with red food coloring GWAR left us begging for more. Roadies gathered up the rubberized pieces of the victims, including former president Reagan, a rock troll and everyone's favourite George W Bush.
I must point out here though that GWAR has matured somewhat as a band. They were arrested in Charlotte for portraying the onstage sodomy of the former pope, and when I saw them in February at the Tremont they were treated to a silent shock when they brought Lacy Peterson out on stage but I saw neither of these figures at the SOTU show.

There may or may not have been some band after GWAR, I don't know because my friend and I returned to our vehicle to get pictures of each other still drenched in the red colored water that GWAR had sprayed most the crowd with throughout their performance. We also figured that since we had been given a list of things to not carry from the parking lot, we might be able to use those same things in the parking lot. We were wrong, there were plainclothes police officers everywhere. Truthfully, we should have known better. Festival concerts like SOTU are like harvest season for the local law enforcement agencies. We got busted for drinking beer in the parking lot.

After a humiliating few minutes spent with the cops I rejoined my friend and resigned myself to the fact that I should be paying five dollars a beer. The cops were good enough to let me back into the premises to see the rest of the show. The condition for my return was that I would not point out any of the undercover cops to any of the other fans. The most disturbing thing I saw at SOTU (bearing in mind that some of stage decorations were dead babies) was when I was being processed in the livestock barn where the cops had set up shop. There were undercover officers in there that looked like honest to goodness metal heads. Replete with spikes, studs and mohawks, that is what I found so scary. The fact that these young cops have become so brainwashed as to turn on their fellows. Oh well, it is best that young people find out early that the people most prone to lie and cheat you for their own advancement are the police. That's one to grow on.

So eventually I got back to the arena. Opeth was playing. My friend is a fan of Opeth, I am not. They have a doom metal sound and are from Europe. I'm not big on doom metal but these guys sounded good. Clean, crisp sound that I would not have imagined possible. They had an impact on the crowd, hopelessness and despair were washing over the assembled masses and then the music would get kind of fast again. It was interesting to watch and fun to listen to.

After that Clutch took the stage. It seemed like most of the crowd was there to see Clutch. Unlike most the musicians on the tour, the members of Clutch were out there as their equipment was being set up, whether this was because someone had messed up last time or if this was a common practice was unclear to me but the crown noticed right away when Neil fallen stood offstage left overlooking the setup like a plantation owner the shouts went up. About 15 minutes later they started. It was an eclectic mix of titles that Clutch played starting with some stuff off their new album and continuing on through classics like "Texan book of the dead" and "Elephant Riders". Clutch should be classified in the hardcore genre but they are constantly evolving using elements of jazz and blues that give the band their distinctive brand of what they call sonic alchemy.

As far as audience appreciation goes, I would have to say that Clutch took the cake. There were a few scattered mosh pits from the other bands of the day but the most people singing along happened during Clutch. Also the moshing was pretty friendly outside a few newbies who didn't realize that there were safety measures in the crowd that were not police. Taking cheap shots at the few black kids in the crowd is not cool and the offenders were made to see the error of their ways. Unlike the guy that got escorted out of the pit by uniformed and undercover cops who wandered near the concession stands afterwards asking "Do I seem that drunk?" My friend told him yes but he still seemed unconvinced.

After Clutch we left, Lamb of God was going to be playing next but my friend and I are not as young as we used to be and so we left the headliner, last chance moshing to the younger generation.

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