[120] Sloths, Wizard Rifle, Dark Castle, YOB (2011)

I'm going to hold off on the previous show I saw so that I can quickly do this more socially relevant post. I don't want to forget any important details in light of my next few days.

Branx was rather warm today. Guess what? They don't have air conditioning. I wouldn't have thought so since Rotture doesn't, but yeah. I hoped. It was at least 85 in the sun when I left the house, which I dislike immensely. Thankfully there was a breeze downtown and something of a breeze in the venue neighborhood.

Of all of the bands, I'd never seen Sloths. I should have before but I'm lazy. In any case, I've known who they are for a while - their guitarist is also one of the guitarists of Nether Regions. Considering how well I (don't) know that number, I was expecting to hear the bands collide, but Sloths stood very much apart from Nether Regions. I think all of the guys in the band are about 18 years old, yet they played with maturity and technical detail that I don't always see out of much older bands. Their bassist was wearing a Young Widows t-shirt; they kind of sounded like them. Hardcore vocals + mathy noise. While I could have done without the vocal style, musically they sounded great.

I think this may have been the best Wizard Rifle show I've seen in a while. Maybe since Black Cobra last July? They played a long song to start with that I was told was new/unrecorded, followed by two familiar high-strung shorter songs. One of those was "Nobody", I've spaced out the other. The new song was great. They keep getting better.

It's been almost exactly a year since I saw Dark Castle for the first time. It was my favorite new-to-me, not-local performance of the year. Then I saw them at Scion - fuck. My expectations are a little high between those two experiences, so I tried to tame that. Nope, still awesome. They only did one song I didn't properly know (from the new album) - the rest I had had time to get into. That said, I barely know their songs by name, so no setlist.

YOB, however, did:

Quantum Mystic,
Prepare The Ground,
two songs that I think were The Great Cessation (possibly a new song with a bunch of padding to make it 20-ish minutes long - I don't know TGC and I've only heard the new album once) and Grasping Air, the second with Stevie from Dark Castle doing a lot of the vocals,
and the encore was Ball of Molten Lead.

"Prepare The Ground" was way better than I expected it to be. Their touring drummer (the same drummer from Dark Castle) held his own ground pretty fucking well. Mike said they'd only practiced four times.

The crowd was decent. Sloths had their own following of moshing kids but the center crowd loosened up after them. It wasn't the densest crowd I've seen there, but I blame the weekend, the weather, and the "all ages" for that (drunks don't like to be trapped... they already are). Still, it was a decent sized crowd, and each band did good regardless of timing.

I don't think "we" told any major entity about an upcoming YOB show that was technically not supposed to be announced yet, but more musically casual individuals who might have been to this show that regularly speak to me or my boss about these things were expectedly not present. White Orange was yesterday, Red Fang is tomorrow, and there are these Rush shows going on in Washington, too. Even so, I think a few people missed out.

That said, YOB is playing a homecoming show in August in Portland. It'll be 21+. You should go.

Edit: There are photos and videos up at The Obelisk forums. Thanks, whomever you are!