A Few Songs I Liked Seamlessly Incorporated Into a Very Tight and Objective Review of My First Day at Roadburn Ever, as Told By Me April 17

EPISODE I: A NEW HOPE

April has been the cruelest month. Year after year (after year) of sitting there looking at festival iteration after festival iteration rise like the sun, and I have been burnt of the taste. Usually it was the money, but it was also having small kids, their strange tendency to come into being every time I think I might be able to make it. Then there was that time I was supposed to actually make it. Ah, the Spring of 2020, the cruelest of months yet again. And then another kid, less money, and an ever-churning machine of war and death that has upended our world about a million times (while destroying the lives of millions). 

In fact, this year probably wasn't going to be my year either. I write this preamble at the airport, oh ye gods of flight, I'm very much expecting you assholes to still find a way to ruin it. But I'm at the airport [spoiler: They failed. Poser-ass gods). 

I have many words for what is transpiring here, now as I sit awaiting my flight to Amsterdam, a flight that almost didn't happen 900 times in the last week alone. A flight the heartbreak of the cancellation of which I had been ready to accept. Heartbreak was my standard operating procedure, it was like the comfy home of darkness. "So I won't go this year, never mind." I was locked and loaded with that. And yet here I am.

So, fate, how about it? I can't tell you how many years I have thought of, imagined, obsessed over this moment. To be clear, I am sitting at the airport, I haven't even taken off yet, so this is point "A" of my first pilgrimage.

It has not been easy being a person with very small children who is also an enjoyer-to-the-point-of-existential-necessity of the weird heavy arts watching all ye young folk and/or people with older kids who just don't give a shit anymore. I have kept steady, writing, listening, interviewing, listing, over-thinking, I have kept steady in all of that all while fearing the arrival of yet another disappointing April, beginning to crest the mountaintop.  

Come say hi if you're here. I'm about to be here too, and this post will be dedicated solely and wholly to here. Here goes nothing. 

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EPISODE II: DAY I (my "day 1," which was Friday, so your "day 2" or whatever)

So, how was my first day at Roadburn? Was it worth the financial ruin? Will my children begrudge my desertion of them? Am I dead? All great questions, but I think for me the quick descent from where I'm from, where I was mentally for years now, because of where I'm from, and the disturbing speed of modern travel, meant that the first few hours were unsteady. [Shut up about yourself Ron, they're here for the "review"]. Ok, I'll get to the weird stuff later, internal voice in brackets, here's a review.

Yellow Eyes at the Engine Room: I got to fulfill a life-long dream in seeing these amazing artists play at Prepare the Ground a couple of years of ago, and it wasn't great. Yes, still one of, if not THE, greatest black metal bands of our time, and it wasn't great, mostly because the sound was off and it was very difficult to tell what was going on. Which, I suspect, with music as "chine-core" (TM) as theirs, must always be a challenge. HOWEVER, the show last night was a cross between a religious experience, a very personal, and to me, maybe I'm wrong, also a collective sigh of joy and relief, and the cosmic skies erupting with hail stones propelled by the thunder-bolt throwing Mike Rekevics. Confusion Gate is, as I wrote in my best of last year, the perfect encapsulation of everything Yellow Eyes have been thus far, and probably the most rockin', forward-racing of their albums to date. It's still fucking Eastern-European sad, you know it is, but it feels as powerful as they've been at least since Sick with Bloom. And the show last night was just further proof of how strong that music is, and how transcendent they are as musicians and as artists. And they fucking played "Sick with Bloom" too. They did that.

When I imagined coming to Roadburn I kept thinking I'd weep everywhere. That has yet to happen. But the Yellow Eyes show was the closest I got. It was just a profoundly beautiful and powerful experience, and one that felt also very personal to me. I love them Yellow Eyed guys, and I felt like they gifted me life.

Also quick side note: Yellow Eyes have been touring with Lars from Sun Worship (great band) on synth. Every time there was an overt synth moment it made the whole room explode. Conclusion: Next Yellow Eyes needs to be somber Eastern European Symphonic Black Metal.

Teardrinker at the Terminal: This was another show I just had to get to, conveniently located next door to the Yellow Eyes show. I am a well-documented Teardrinker fan and supporter, and had the honor of having them in the most recent Benefit Compilation. I loved what Kim and the gang dreamed up for this commissioned project, and I was so shocked and so happy to see the fucking size of the room they managed to command. But I really was so overwhelmed by life and by arriving and the flight and then by Yellow Eyes killing me that I just had to get out. Apologies to the band, this isn't a fair review, but they were amazing.

At that point I had that feeling of profound loneliness that I know I get when I'm away from home. I looked around, knew no one, didn't know what to do, felt sad, and so walked back to my AirBnb defeated and broken, walking past a nice Dutch park packed with nice Dutch kids and nice Dutch parents who at that moment felt like much better parents than I. Also close to weeping here, gotta say. At this point I called home and had a video chat with my wife and my two boys (my eldest daughter wasn't home). 

Review of my call Home: My kids are the best, my boys insisting on showing me their socks by sticking their legs at their mom's phone camera, and my wife was beautiful and also annoyed by said boys. I was sad with them, they made me happy, and I kind of told myself I owed it to myself to get back at it. And thusly I went to see Kowloon Walled City. I met some friends from back home (Noam and Erez hi!) which made a world of difference, just being able to sit and talk with other humans. Then I went in to show.

Just as I was walking in, undone emotionally, I was approached by the wonderful Ramón Oriol, a long-time reader and one of most supportive and positive people I have ever met online. He was so wonderful, and so, again, supportive of what I do, introducing me to his lovely wife Martha, whom I immediately identified as being of that specific fate which is being married to a music nut. Ramon was the medicine I needed and I was really so moved by…. Just by him. We later got into the show, he bought me a beer, I told him I didn't need a beer, but I was wrong. 

Kowloon Walled City at The Terminal: Ramon said something to me about Roadburn, he said it was like home. A home, I think, for the like-minded. I didn't see that as possible, because at the time I felt so un-home. But Kowloon Walled City fixed that. And the beer, I think the beer had something to do with that. And Ramon (and Martha, obviously). The basic facts are that it was, again, one of the best shows I have ever seen, probably the best "big room" show I had ever seen. I know I just said that about Yellow Eyes, but it was perfect for so different reasons. Yellow Eyes was this magical melding of the ringing bees emitted by Sam and Will with the primal footing provided by Alex and Mike. But KWC was a scientific, precise exercise in laying notes, single notes, one on top of the other, building tensions, releasing it, and spreading said notes with just enough room to devastate you.

This is no surprise to me, given how much I fucking love this band and how throw-backey (in a great way) they feel to me to my love of bands that create brute force from seemingly meek means (Fugazi, Killing Joke). But also unsurprising because Scott Evans doesn't only have one of the best ears in heavy music he also know what to do to satisfy the demand of said years. I suspect that process is a very OCD one, and I suspect audio-perfection like the one I was exposed to in that room isn't easy.

It's bare, it's "bare bones" and when it's performed to such a level of, again, perfection – it felt like being squashed like a bug. In the best way possible. And getting to hear "The Pressure that Keeps Me Alive" live was a true gift. One of my favorite tracks from one of my favorite albums (interview with Scott about that album here).

After that show ended I finally got to meet the wonderful, supportive, and multi-talented Gijs, who drums for Teardrinker and Lijkschouwer, and who himself, I suspect will one day be a Scott Evans of the production side if he ever felt like it. I cannot put into words what Gijs did for me. I was better, you see, I saw another good show and drew the strength a good show can give, but I was still alone. Gijs made it so I wasn't alone anymore. He quickly introduced me to everyone, his amazing siblings – may my children whom I miss so much right now but for whom I had bought chocolates so we're good be so loving toward each other when they grow up – every bandmate, including the kind and wonderful Rens of Lijkschouwer, the unstoppable and irreplaceable Kim, and I was immediately with (Dutch) family. The best part was that everyone was so nice, but then when he told them who I was they were immediately overjoyed. Not because I'm this amazing weirdo-metal celebrity (also because of that, of course) but because they knew I had made him happy with my coverage of the band(s). And that, I mean, what can you say to that? That's the dream. That is the dream.

At that point I was whisked away by Gijs and the gang to see the secret Habak show at the skate park. Thus ensued:

The Habak Secret Show at Skate Park: I already liked Habak, and wrote about them a while back, mostly thanks to their great label Persistent Vision, pointing me their way. But I was not ready. They seem so young, is it me that is so old, but they seem so young and the same time move and play as if they were born from a hardcore/screamo womb. It was so intense, so joy-emitting, so insane that it's right up there with some of the most emotionally, physically, musically brutal and beautiful things I have ever seen.

After the Habak show I kept moving in Gijs' blessed circles and within said circles went ahead and walked toward one of the bucket-list achievements of this three-day extravaganza, which was to get to finally see Krallice live.

Krallice at the 013 Main Stage: Krallice, much like Yellow Eyes, has had an outsized role in the life of this blog and my own musical life in general. They are, as I might have said, the closest thing black metal or really weird black metal will ever have to Immolation in that they are brilliant relentlessly and without end. Not a bad track, not a bad release, always changing. Years Past Matter, specifically, had a huge impact on me, was the subject of my interview with Nick back in the day, and so the fact I missed their Thursday set was dimmed by the fact I might get to hear some of that album.

The show was, I think, everything I thought or hoped it might be, compounded by my aging back, being this late into A LONG day, and my aging knees. Krallice is always, to an extent, an exercise in endurance, always on the very toes of every fiber in your being being tuned into whatever fucked frequency those geniuses have in their transmitters. And seeing them live with a bad back is like that, times a hundred. Like being punched in the face over and over again, and being in pain, but wanting more. This might sound like suffering, but it has more to do with a kind of ascetic passion. With seeing monks go crazy and speak in tongues and you want to run away but are transfixed by the magic. I needed to sit down after that one. 

After Krallice another huge bucket-list moment was looming, the Cult of Luna show. I have been a fan since Salvation, so that's 23 years of waiting to see them live, relishing every live recorded moment and knowing, just knowing, that CoL are the band to see live. But I didn't. I was sitting my old ass down near the 013, having just told the boys at Yellow Eyes, specifically Sam, how much that show meant to me and what's so special about Confusion Gate to me. So my ass was down. But then I saw Dan of Have a Nice Life, who I had spotted earlier in the day but was too intimidated/sad to say hi, and so I said hi (we conversed once when I interviewed him about The Unnatural World). And we hung out, we talked about making art for a living vs. make art not for a living and we talked about the differences between writing words (literature, blogs) and music, and I decided that an evening with Dan talking about art would be my headline show. We also met the lovely Natalya from Fifth Alliance who lost her voice and was sweet and kind. It wasn't the Cult of Luna show, which, again, is still a dream for me. But it felt like the right thing to do. 

Especially since I also got to chat with Mike from Inter Arma/Artificial Brain, which is always such a joy. What a great dude and what an amazing MUSICIAN (if you ever read this Mike, you might get the point here). Can't wait to see them do The Cavern on Sunday.

I will now detail the last show of the day for me, and I will split it this time into two: My experience, and that of my lower back:

My Experience of the Bosse de Nage show at the Engine Room: Another "I can't believe this is happening moment" with another incredible band I never thought I would get to see live. Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not the BdN live energy is an episode of The Office devolving into black metal, in the best way possibly. Just watching someone intently and with supreme artistry freak the fuck out. What a privilege.

My Lower Back's Experience of the Bosse de Nage show at the Engine Room: Get me in bed, NOW. THIS HAS TO STOP. YOU JUST FLEW IN TODAY, GO TO BED.

So, ten minutes before they ended, I did. 

And, that, ladies and gentlemen, was ONE DAY. My god. This place will either remake me, rebuild me, renew me (what am I, John Donne?) or break me. 

EPISODE III: Songs But Not A Lot Because You Know Why

Truck Violence – "New Jesus," from The Weathervane is My Body (Noise Rock – The Flenser) . Appropriately beginning with a band I hope to get to see, and of which I had written a couple of years ago. Raw power, the raw power I had felt was there, for instance, in the first couple Chat Pile EPs. Perhaps an unfair comparison, but I think one that makes sense, and one that really kind of stands out given their ultimate shared home in the Flensing capital, home to brethren in pain, Crippling Alcoholism (who I will sadly miss). Can't wait for this album, can't wait for this show.

Desiccation – "The Alchemy of Grief," from Legatum Mortuorum (Black Metal – Carbonized Records). Very excited about this one as their previous and brilliant album Cold Dead Earth remains amazing underrated and was one of my favorites for that year of someone's lord 2022. Cold is right with this first single off of their sophomore release, one that has more than a hint of cold-ass synth too. Sounds great.