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SHOW REVIEW: Grown Ass Men, Clinging To The Trees Of A Forest Fire, Gristmill
Posted by: Necci – Aug 05, 2011
Grown Ass Men, Clinging To The Trees Of A Forest Fire, Gristmill
Tuesday, August 2 at Strange Matter
Unfortunately, this show was missing a couple of the bands originally intended to be on the bill. Portland (OR) grindcore band Transient were in a van wreck on the way to the show; everyone survived, but their singer ended up in the hospital with a broken wrist and a dislocated hip, and their van was totaled. Meanwhile, Richmond's own Heathens were forced to cancel due to being locked out of their practice space. Thankfully, at least for me, the two bands I wanted to see, Richmond's own Grown Ass Men and Denver's Clinging To The Trees Of A Forest Fire, were still going to play. With the addition of Portland (ME) grindcore band Gristmill, who jumped onto the show at the last minute, the show started to seem like it had a full lineup again.
Gristmill started things off just after 11 PM, playing a mix of crust, grind, and some of that biker-metal influenced hardcore that has been really popular in the DIY underground ever since His Hero Is Gone burst onto the scene back in the late 90s. Gristmill's version of this sound wasn't bad by any means, but it was obvious almost immediately that they were a very young band who hadn't quite worked out the kinks in their sound. I couldn't tell whether they were relatively unpracticed or just having trouble hearing each other, but a few times during the course of their set, the guitarist and the drummer would seem to have a mid-song disagreement about where in the song they actually were, at which point one of them would change to the next part of the song while the other would continue playing the previous one. Sometimes they recovered from this, but at least twice, the song ground to a halt entirely.
Another thing that made it even more obvious that Gristmill hadn't quite figured out what kind of band they wanted to be was the case of their disappearing singer. They started the set as a four-piece--bass player, drummer, guitarist, and a female singer who wasn't playing any other instrument. Over the course of the first few songs, it seemed like the guitarist was doing just as much singing as the singer, which I always find strange. When there's someone in the band whose sole job is to sing, it's weird if another member of the band sings just as much as that person does. But then, after four songs or so, the singer put her microphone down and walked away. The bassist indicated to the soundman that they wouldn't need her microphone to be on anymore, and Gristmill did the second half of their set as a three-piece, with the guitarist doing all the singing. So then the question arose in my mind--was the female singer even a full-fledged member of the band? Or was she more like a really frequent guest performer? It's a question I can't answer, and I have my doubts that Gristmill themselves really know the answer either. There's definite potential within their overall sound, but more practice, as well as a more concrete idea of their lineup and their goals as a band, will all be necessary before they'll start to achieve that potential.
Clinging To The Trees Of A Forest Fire followed Gristmill, and were the only band of the evening to perform onstage instead of on the floor of the venue. While all of the bands on the evening's bill could be considered grindcore, Clinging To The Trees... were different enough from the other two bands to remind me of the fact that there are essentially three different grindcore genres. There's the more crust/punk-based version of grindcore, which is what Gristmill played; the more hardcore version, generally known as power-violence, which is the style Grown Ass Men play in (we'll talk more about that in a few moments); and then there's grindcore that is essentially metal-based, with little to no influence from hardcore or punk. This is the style of grindcore that Clinging To The Trees... belong to.
Out of the three versions of grindcore, metal-based grind is the version I am least familiar with, probably due to the fact that I don't follow the metal scene as closely as I follow the hardcore scene. I find that I like the bands in this genre when I hear them, though, and that's definitely true of Clinging To The Trees..., a band that I only ever encountered because this magazine is on their label's promo list. I got a copy of last year's Songs Of Ill Hope And Desperation and loved it, so I really wanted to see how their sound translates live. It turns out that it's just as much of a pulverizing wall of volcanic horror, only it's much, much louder. The bass player was having trouble getting his amp to be loud enough so that it could be heard over the guitarist's amp, but it was hardly necessary most of the time, as the guitar and drums generated noise in more than sufficient quantities by themselves. On record, I found the guitarist's vocals to sound mostly like incoherent screams, and live, they were much the same. Even if the record does have a printed lyric sheet, I find it hard to believe that he's singing any actual words. That's OK, though, because the indecipherable howling gets the point across quite nicely, and works well with Clinging To The Trees...'s overall sound. They played a loud, tight set, and the relatively small crowd was nonetheless quite appreciative.
Grown Ass Men ended the evening with their dual-vocal power violence sound, a sound that was first created in the late 80s by bands like Infest and Crossed Out. What those bands did was to both speed up and slow down standard hardcore songwriting, so that faster parts were faster than ever, while slow parts were extremely slow and crushing. Then they eschewed the rock-based verse/chorus/verse song structure that hardcore was still using, for the most part, in favor of short, constantly changing tunes that crammed enough riffs for 8 normal songs into an extremely brief amount of time, generally 45 seconds or less. Eric Wood of Man Is The Bastard nicknamed this style "power violence" 20 years ago, and it still survives and thrives in certain segments of the hardcore scene. There's been somewhat of a revival of the sound over the last two years, in fact, often by older members of the scene who were playing that same style over a decade ago and are now returning to it. Grown Ass Men are Richmond's own contribution to that revival, being a quintet of thirtysomething men who all have prior grindcore credentials. The best-known previous bands that members of Grown Ass Men were involved in were probably Stop It!! and Phobia, but the former bands of theirs that most accurately point the way towards their current project are probably JRS and Wheelbite, a couple of late-90s Richmond bands that mixed elements of power-violence into more straightforward hardcore. Those bands also led with their sense of humor, a trait that Grown Ass Men have inherited.
Grown Ass Men's sense of humor is darker than that of their previous bands, and a lot of their black humor is based around the fact that they are getting older. Their unofficial theme song is "I'm Too Old For This Shit," which was a highlight of their 17-song set. They blew through their tunes at a rapid rate, and singers Paul Micou and Murty Gollakota put a lot of energy into their delivery, running around the room and jumping into the air even as they delivered their thousand-mile-a-minute lyrics. Changes blew by at lightning speed, the songs were varied enough to keep things interesting throughout, and the energy level was through the roof--a surprising fact when discussing a band who place a lot of emphasis on their relatively advanced age. While I'm sure their changing perspectives on life influence the songs they write, some of their emphasis on age is in service of a humorous gimmick. They aren't as young as they once were, but Grown Ass Men are certainly a long way from being old.
The same is probably true of me, come to think of it. However, I am being entirely sincere when I say that I was elated to discover, when Grown Ass Men reached the end of their set, that the entire show had taken place over the course of 90 minutes. I may not really count as old yet, but I don't have the same tolerance for long, drawn-out shows that I once had. Despite the abbreviated length of the evening's entertainment, I left Strange Matter feeling totally satisfied. It's nice to be able to hit a club, see a few bands, and still get home with plenty of time to get a full night's sleep before work. It's even better when the bands are as good as they were at this show.
By Andrew Necci
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