Maryland Deathfest Is Decadent And Depraved, Day Three

Day 3

We pulled up to the great brick monstrosity of the Sonar at three o’clock, time enough for the end of Dragged Into Sunlight.  One wishes they’d take a goddamn hint, as I couldn’t get a picture of them off.  I’m a journalist, dammit: I can make do with shitty pictures, but at least give me a picture to work with.  I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face!  They’re pretty good all in all.  I wasn’t going to stand around and let The Devil’s Blood give me a flashback to 1974, though.  It’s behind me now, even if I came twenty years too late to live through that year of your Lord, and it’s pretty arrogant of you to assume that I have some kind of unquenchable nostalgia for a decade I wasn’t even born in and whose sole claimants to any sort of throne of quality are Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top.  Deviated Instinct will soothe my raging beast better, thank you so much, and don’t give me shit for it!  To Hell with your antiquated, ironic retro-rock, to Hell with your eye-winking pathos that takes all that is true and authentic and regurgitates it up in a morass of decadence and filth.  I want the Truth.  I need the Truth.  And crust punk, with its over-earnesty and lack of any degree of self-awareness, will provide that Truth.  Were only all Americans so inclined: we spend our lived deluding ourselves with self-reference, leaving nothing sacred and everything open for profit.  Metal is our only respite, so often trapped in its own continuity that it can never annoy out of self-awareness.  Hail to Metal!  Down with the World!  Legalize murder!  For I am the Misanthrope! Hater of all mankind!

I had said before that Horna had shocked me with their example of how far second-rate black metal bands will take things in the pursuit of kvltness and authenticity.  This is best explained in dialogue, for to fully capture my thoughts at that moment simply cannot be accomplished by conventional methods of human communication (smoke signals or semaphore or some archaic Babylonian cuneiformic incantation or Norse runemagick are probably the only methods esoteric enough to convey this):

(All dialogue should be imagined as being shouted directly into the other party’s ear canal, as such was the only way that speech could be detected in the blaring noise holocaust of the Sonar.  Hence ! in place of .)

The Author: Fuck yeah, Horna!  Goat’s blood and Devil’s Tits! Devil’s tits!  Big bloody huge mammaries lolling lazily from the infernal bosom of the lower Lord!

Pretty Metal Girl Adjacent To Me, Pissed At Having To Stand Next To Tit-Worshipping Journalist Cretin: Yeah…whatever!  Tits!  Yeah!  Awesome!

TA: *black metal screams*.  That fake blood is so awesome!  What smells weird?!

PMGATMPAHTSNTTWJC: You know what that is, right?!  What blood?!

TA: …corn starch?!

PMGATMPAHTSNTTWJC: (misheard) It’s minstrel blood!

TA: Minstrel blood?! How’d they get all those damn minstrels to give up their precious ichor, anyway?!  Did they kill them?!  Walk into a minstrel show and bleed them onstage, laughing with an audience perked up by the spilling of innocent blood to quench the needs of five men?!  Is this what America has come to?!  Fucking Finnish Nazis walking into our blackface routines and killing the great racially insensitive performers of our era?!  War on the Finns! Finish the Finnish!  End the job Stalin started, and keep our performers intact to sing “Old Black Joe” to geriatrics with no moral compass for another day!

PMGATMPAHTSNTTWJC:…not minstrel blood, menstrual blood! MENSTRUAL blood!

TA: (cue stunned silence for roughly 30 seconds, give or take) Really?!

PMGATMPAHTSNTTWJC: Apparently!

TA: Where…where do you get that?!

PMGATMPAHTSNTTWJC: From a woman!  From the looks of things, probably multiple women!  Maybe another animal that menstruates similarly to humans, possibly a primate such as a gorilla or a bonobo!  If they have access to that in Finland, that is!  So probably not!  Best guess is human!

TA: Well, yes! Huh! Wow! 

(Both parties stand awkwardly for rest of set, Author in disbelief as to how five Finnish degenerates came into acquired that much menstruation, PMGATMPAHTSNTTWJC in satisfied, slightly smug Morgendorfer-esque silence at finally having shut up the Cretin Journalist.)

The rest of the night was a straight line from Noothgrush to Winter.  Noothgrush posed a specific problem when the usual mosh-at-all-costers began to throw trash cans and a monstrously hefty Wesley Willis look-alike in a Brutal Truth cap entered the pit.  They weren’t moving fast, but this one had girth on his side, and I was standing before a pillar.  My God, if he was pitched into me, I’d be flattened instantly like a cricket beneath a truck tire!  I had to get away, but everywhere I was, he was to, a gargantuan homing missile that moved about the pit with the deftness of a ballerina in spite of his corpulence.  Getting out of there to Morbid Angel was supposed to be a respite, but Trey Azagthoth had other plans.  Halfway through, something happened to his machinery of a nature I could not see, and he made the decision then to extricate himself from the stage in the pursuit of World of Warcraft, leaving Dave Vincent and the other nameless players who now support him to finish the set.  Donald Mulligan’s Celtic features reddened beyond what I thought possible: “They can’t fucking do that!” he keened like a banshee, “It’s a complete betrayal of the fans!  I have looked high upon the sky and lo have I foreseen Morbid Angel’s imminent breakup!  You cannot argue this!”  I wouldn’t argue with Don anyway, though; his sly Gaelic tongue is as deft as Wilde’s, a wit about it that will lay you out as flat as a left from one stocky hand of his ruddy arm.  Morbid Angel did disappoint, then.  End of discussion. 

However, Winter salvaged the evening with a set that was probably as close to a massage as a metal show could ever provide.  Lots of low end, good for lower back pain and tired calves.  Granted, it does tend to loosen the old anus up a bit, but my Kegels are strong and the advantage of not eating on account of the despicably inedible fest food was the lack of shit in my colon to be ingloriously excreted.  I am an inadvertently clever man in this regard: everything I do works itself out whether or not I can think of it, except when it doesn’t.  But for tonight, it did.  And a sedate ride from Dr. Street-Jammer to boot, with the unlikely updated company of that irate Leinsterman Donald Mulligan and that mad, skinny, and madly skinny hedonist of the senses Josiah Szekler.  A man will have many moments in his life when everything fits into place and surprises to satisfy.  This came close.  The sweet-tea vodka was a low blow, however.  Some things should not mix: Trey Azagthoth and online computer nerd mouther-breather games, and sweet tea and vodka.  At least not if sanity is valued, which for a good journalist it is not.