I Am Heresy, Hierophant, Five Minute Fall – Rockhouse Salzburg, 3/20/12

(Flyer courtesy of United People Booking)

If you know Derek and I, you know that we spent a huge amount of time in our lives back in Salt Lake either playing or going to hardcore shows. It’s a unique place, full of iconoclasts and extremes on both sides, and our music scene reflected that. Whether you were a skramz cheerleader, an alt-rock jock, a mathcore nerd, or a stoner metal burnout, there was always somewhere to go on a Friday night, and it didn’t come easy. Most of Salt Lake’s best venues and shows came from the hard work of a handful of really dedicated, really great people, who built places like the Underground from the ruins to ensure that the counter-culture remained, that local music survived in one of the most conservative places in America.

And it was amazing. We got to be a part of this welcoming and dynamic music scene, and while there were, like all things, flaws and downfalls and super shitty nights when everyone left feeling bummed out, it is totally something to be thankful for. We live in Salzburg now, and we were really starting to wonder if we’d have to spend hundreds of Euros every time we wanted to see a band. Karlsruhe and Munich were great, but it was looking like our love of hardcore was going to be a very expensive relationship.

And then, Derek was looking at the United People Booking page a week or so back, checking into details about Strife on April 23rd (a pleasant surprise of its own, one of Derek’s favorite bands two days after his birthday, oh fate) and saw that I Am Heresy was coming with the Italian black metal/powerviolence band Hierophant. Coming to the Rockhouse, the venue that is, literally, like five blocks from our apartment.

So last night, after six months of living here, we got our hometown hardcore show. We had always assumed the Rockhouse was a venue for big, 500+ people shows, because it stands up against the Kapuzinerberg and looks to be about four stories tall. But as we ducked in to catch the show, we were enveloped in warm red light and discovered we were in a womb-like tunnel dug, seemingly, right into the rock.

It was cozy. The red and blue light made it feel like a page torn out of a 90’s special edition 3-D comic book, really bright in that one, solid shade. The Austrian local openers Five Minute Fall were starting their set, the room was comfortably full, and we stood back near the bar to take it all in.

I’ll say that we were interested to see what the show would be like, what Five Minute Fall would be like, in particular, because the descriptions we’d read talking about metalcore and melodic hardcore made us a bit wary. After all, Derek and I have both seen our fair share of really forgettable metalcore bands, but we ended up enjoying the surprising mix of styles and the genuine performance. While the band would occasionally indulge in the heavy, bass-drum, crash cymbal breakdowns that have become an identifier to metalcore, the set was peppered with more technical, melodic guitar parts that kept it feeling fresh and keeping us interested. Derek remarked that Five Minute Fall seems like a band that has made compromises with each other in the writing process, taking riffs from traditional heavy metal, melodic parts synonymous with emotional screamo, heavy-hitting drums, and the compromise has made them all the better. In the biography available on their website, Five Minute Fall says, “Instead of focusing on trends, they try to write honest music.” Smart move.

During the breakdown of equipment and setting up, Derek and I talked a little about Hierophant, a new edition to Bridge Nine records. He heard about them through his friend, who sent him a link to their Bandcamp, and Derek was in. Following the ongoing shift in hardcore towards dark, violent, three minute bursts of chaos and anger, Hierophant delivers. The result is this blistering set that attacks at full speed, while you rock back and forth, bob your head, and feel the energy radiating off of the vocalist’s shaved head. Throughout the set, he charges back and forth, screaming and raising fists in the air as a show of solidarity, while the band plays behind at full volume, full distortion, until something breaks. Of course, we loved it.

Derek likened them to a Crust / D-Beat version of Zao, Liberate Te Ex Inferis era, with a hint of Black Breath. What Hierophant does is still relatively new in hardcore, though the self-destructive occult worship card is becoming ever more drawn. The question that Hierophant raised in our minds, or rather, the worry, is that this too will at some point become so overproduced and commodified that the validity will be gone. We can’t predict the future, but our genuine hope is that it won’t. We want the intense technical skill, the passion, the anger to remain a powerful thing.

Derek has been listening to Boy Sets Fire for a very long time. He has six of their albums and their split with Coalesce loaded onto his computer, and I’d wager a bet that he has even more back in the immense collection (hundreds, I tell you) of CDs back at home. They were one of the formative bands in his earlier years, seeing them play with Snapcase after his mission. Conversely, I have only heard the Boy Sets Fire that Derek has put on charming mix CDs for me, what he’s had playing in the background while we work on projects, so on and so forth. I remember being about an hour and a half into the drive away from Salt Lake City, the first time I left home, getting pumped up by the opening riff of “Rookie,” but I didn’t know then that Derek had consistently listened to that same riff for over a decade.

The story of I Am Heresy is part funny, part heartwarming. The band’s bio on Magic Bullet’s site reveals that, while Nathan Gray was parting ways with a side piece, the Casting Out, his son Simon and the son of Boy Sets Fire guitarist Joshua Latshaw were playing in a band of their own. Nathan “walked in” on his son playing guitar, and from then on, they decided to join forces. My mom and I played roller derby together. Nathan Gray and his son play all of Europe together.

From the first song, it was clear that I Am Heresy would be dishing out the heavy just like Hierophant before. Far crunchier than Boy Sets Fire, the departure is clear. This is not a tribute band, this is an animal of a whole different color, ready to be sacrificed. Nathan’s vocals move away from the cleaner style into a strained scream, sounding all the more powerful when coupled with the half-cat, half-lizard contortions he twists his body into when taking a break from pacing back and forth, lunging at the crowd. Still, the moments come when Nathan’s clean vocals shine through, a bit older and more refined than the earlier work, but, as Derek said, “He just can’t let go of it completely.” With the backing vocals providing contrasting harmonies and accenting screams, “And Yet It Moves” is an excellent representation of the recurring theme of I Am Heresy. The music never goes head-on into one solid expression, leaving room to experiment.

A handful of songs began with sound clips, taken from the album, things like the song “Prince of the Flies,” which includes a piano and female vocals, leading into the gutsy, Converge-reminiscent “Butchers.” On the one hand, this production shows the fine-tuning I Am Heresy has been able to achieve. On the other, it felt a little out of place at such an intimate hardcore show, although we all know sound clips are nothing out of the ordinary. All in all, these provided just a short break from the bone-shaking heaviness, and gave Nathan a chance to catch his breath. During one such clip, while he took a few deep breaths, someone at the front of the crowd made a joke. He responded, “I gotta take a break!” He laughed, paced some more, “I should tell y’all I’m fuckin’ 40 years old!” As the band started in to the next song, he picked up the microphone and added, “And I’ll still be here when I’m 82!”

“Did you hear what he said about his age?” I asked Derek, on the walk home. He hadn’t heard the exchange, so I recounted it to him, and we both agreed that it’s a pretty good life. So often as a musician or an artist, doing what you love to do, being where you want to be, you face that voice inside that says, “Yeah, it’s great, but you’re gonna have to give it up someday.” The existence of bands like I Am Heresy proves that you never have to give up. You can grow and adapt. You can start a new band with your adult son, and kill it on stage all over the globe. You don’t have to make a choice between life and hardcore. They can, and they should be, one and the same.