Hardcore on the Dance Floor

Finally, for all to see, here's my long overdue review of hardcore fest:

The weekend of September 20th in Boston marked the first annual Great American Hardcore Fest, sponsored by Mass Live Events. The event, a three day festival featuring hardcore punk bands from Boston and across the nation, culminated on Sunday at Revere’s Club Lido, located just next to the Wonderland T-stop on the Blue line. After waiting in line for close to two hours, the young crowd of patrons was treated to a thorough search for weapons, as well as having wallet chains and water bottles confiscated. The Club Lido staff, it would seem, was on edge.

If Club Lido doesn’t exactly seem like a hardcore venue, I suspect that it isn’t. It’s more of a nightclub style venue (according to their website, they specialize in “international music concerts and mixed martial arts events”), but dance floors can easily be converted into mosh pits; and the dual stages served the event very well, cutting out the between-band setup time completely. Once one band was finished, the next would start right up, resulting in either an orderly migration or a full-speed mass exodus, depending on the band. The bar area was an elevated platform next to the main stage, and the under-21 crowd was strictly forbidden from even ascending the stairs. Some of them, the ‘straight-edge’ anti-drug and alcohol set, wore the Xs on their hands as a badge of honor, while to others they were a nuisance preventing them from enjoying the four dollar Pabst Blue Ribbons.

The dual headliners for the night were the influential Boston quartet Converge and Cleveland metal-infused hardcore pioneers Integrity. A nasty chest cold and a need to be up early in the morning prevented me from catching Integrity’s set (although, against my better judgement, it didn't prevent me from indulging in some of those 4 dollar PBRs), but I was determined not to miss Converge, whose furiously intense live shows have become the stuff of legend.

Converge opened up with ‘Concubine,’ the blindingly fast lead track off their seminal 2001 release Jane Doe. At the outset, this looked to be another standout live performance. The next song was ‘Dark Horse,’ the recently released debut track off their forthcoming album Axe to Fall, due out October 20th on Epitaph Records. It was about here that things started to go awry. Halfway through the song, the band appeared to lose power in one or more of their amplifiers, resulting in an awkward pause and leaving the song unfinished before its bombastically loud outro. Converge’s live performances rely heavily on audience participation and interaction, but after this snafu, the audience seemed to lose their enthusiasm. Apart from two or three animated audience members (one of whom was my friend Dan, who got a tooth broken in half during Guns Up!'s set - at least he snagged a pack of cigarettes off the floor), the mosh pit area was a ghost town. It didn’t help that security at Club Lido seemed unusually strict (I was pulled aside and reprimanded twice by security simply for holding my arms out to block people from charging into me - okay, I might've shoved back a few times, but come on).

Converge went on to play another new song, the hyperspeed title track ‘Axe to Fall.’ This one got the crowd going a bit more, but it was still a bit lackluster compared to previous shows. A trio of songs from their 2006 effort No Heroes followed (the three short blasts of noise ‘Vengeance,’ ‘Heartache,’ and ‘Hellbound’), as well as another new song that I didn’t catch the title of, a slow, crunchy number similar to past songs such as ‘You Fail Me’ and ‘Hell To Pay.’ After this, frontman Jacob Bannon began to inquire as to how much time was left in their set, and finding that it wasn’t a lot, they closed out with ‘Eagles Become Vultures’ off their 2004 Epitaph Records debut You Fail Me. This last song was the most energetic of the night, inspiring audience members to jump at the mic screaming the chorus of "Cashed in, crashed and burned," but it was too little, too late. Live favorites such as ‘The Saddest Day,’ ‘Conduit,’ and ‘Locust Reign’ were all conspicuously absent, and the set was hamstrung by the lackadaisical crowd, technical difficulties, and lack of any of the band’s pre-2000 material. It wasn’t a terrible set, but from previous shows I’ve attended, I know that Converge is capable of so much more.

The good news in all of this is that the sets leading up to Converge were, by and large, fantastic. Texas natives Powertrip were an early highlight, playing a high energy blend of 1980s-style thrash and punk rock that would’ve felt at home on a Suicidal Tendencies record. The Mongoloids from New Jersey took the stage at four p.m. with a wonderfully sloppy set that inspired the biggest mosh pit of the day thus far, and their singer was the first in the lineup to jump off the stage and take to the audience, and the California collective Trash Talk reinforced their reputation for out of control audience melees with their seven p.m. set of spastic hardcore.

The two biggest highlights of the night, however, were a couple of Massachusetts locals. Colin of Arabia from Brockton put on a vastly entertaining show, wherein burly, bearded singer Colin Campbell climbed atop amplifiers and P.A. monitors, dragged audience members to the stage, and declared the show “by far the best festival we’ve played this year.” Colin really knows how to get a crowd going, asking between songs if anyone in the audience had anything they wanted to say, and, during the song ‘Science of Violence,’ screaming the wonderful non-sequitur, “Ted Kennedy is fucking dead!”

Shortly thereafter, The Carrier took the stage with their brutally loud, emotionally intense, and entirely unique brand of hardcore. The crowd surged back and forth as if possessed, a windmilling fury of arms and legs, but vocalist Anthony Traniello appeared entirely in control throughout the set. When they launched into the fan favorite ‘Alcatraz,’ it was the most exhilarating moment in a day filled with exhilarating moments.

Overall then, despite whatever mild issues I opened with, I’d consider the Great American Hardcore Fest a resounding success. I’m still not sure Club Lido is the ideal venue for such an event, but venues of its size willing to host hardcore festivals are few and far between. I for one hope that this event becomes an annual tradition from here on out.

Coming Soon in Music: Reviews of new albums by DOOM, Doomriders, and Mission of Burma - a whole lot of Doomin' goin' on.

(Colin of Arabia image obtained via http://www.returntothepit.com)