ATRIARCH//OCCULT SS//SAME-SEX DICTATOR @ CHOP SUEY 11/7
Preview by Jake McCune
In my personal vision of a sound and just world, all shows are three-band bills. Two bands? Maybe if I’ve got work in the morning. More than three? What are you, a sadist? I can’t be around other people that long, and the likelihood that I’ll enjoy every band on a bill once you add more than three dips dramatically. Three bands, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, allows for maximum enjoyment and minimum boredom.
So all the praise in the world goes to Chop Suey for booking an excellent duo of local support for Portland mainstays Atriarch this Friday. All three bands are celebrating new releases, and are guaranteed to fill you up with Northwest Darkness this Friday.
Headliners Atriarch are no strangers to our fair city, and it has been a pleasure to watch their growth as a band over the last three or four years of opening for bigger acts and headlining smaller venues here in Seattle. Their excellent Relapse Records debut, ‘An Unending Pathway,’ feels like a culmination of sorts for these gentlemen. It is a fully realized blend of the mish-mash of death rock, doom, black metal and drone that they have been honing into their own unique sound over the course of their last two full-lengths. Vocalist Lenny Smith, always an entertaining presence on stage, has hit his stride in blending esoteric chanting, goth-tinged clean singing and heart-wrenching screams into a truly unique vocal presence for the band.
Smith’s vocal shape-shifting mirrors the rest of the band on songs like album opener “Entropy,” which moves right along from an opening of atmospheric drones and tribal drumming into downright dance-able rhythms that slowly spirals downwards into caustic doom. Writing about an Atriarch song feels spastic, and that’s only because the band has such a talent of blending stylistic variations into a well-composed five minute song.
Openers Occult SS and Same-Sex Dictator are the perfect complement to Atriarch’s broad-spectrum of doom and gloom. OSS’s newest split, with local like-minded heathens in CROSS, is scheduled for release soon and the excellently titled preview track “Last Chance Butcher” is a ripping blend of black metal, thrash and d-beat that the band has (jokingly?) self-labeled as “bastard pop.” Given how much fun I have listening to their songs, I can’t say the term is inaccurate.
Same-Sex Dictator will be kicking things off with their bass and drum driven blend of noise. The band’s latest, ‘Open the Coffin,’ is available on tape and digital from Hanged Man Recordings. Show up early to be brutalized by one of the weirdest and loudest two-piece bands around town.
Atriarch – http://atriarch.bandcamp.com/
Occult SS – http://ossmusic1.bandcamp.com/album/12-split-w-cross
Same-Sex Dictator – http://hangedman.bandcamp.com/album/open-the-coffin
