As we’ve all heard by now, it’s getting tougher and tougher to make it as a touring musician. One recent trend I’ve seen is bands having no opening acts whatsoever; last Friday at the Empty Bottle, for example, UK post-rock band caroline started playing at 10 and the show was over by 11:30. (They do have support acts listed for the rest of the tour, however.) A bit of a hike for such a brief performance but they were incredible and should probably be charging more than $30 for a ticket to be honest. The fact that all but one member managed to get their visas in order could be considered a minor miracle in this day and age, making it all the more puzzling that doing strings of a half-dozen or so dates is somehow the most financially viable strategy, but when do overseas acts ever do full-scale U.S. tours any more? A single Midwest date is a luxury in this day and age; thank you caroline for popping in!
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum: Sepultura. The Brazilian metal legends say their current tour is their farewell, and they brought a mini-festival with them to The Rave on Sunday. Metal may be somewhat insulated from industry downsides; the community was very merch-centric way before it became essential for bands’ survival, and the old guard of thrash and death metal acts continue to tour themselves into the ground, swapping members as needed, still inspiring devil horns everywhere they go. Sunday’s eight-band bill was an incredibly broad spectrum of metal subgenres, a fitting tribute to the variety of modern acts who’ve been influenced in one way or another by Sepultura.
I arrived at the venue in time to catch the latter portion of Ghost Bath’s set in the basement aka The Rave II, which was heavy on the black metal and light on the “-gaze”. This band was part of the oh-so-brief period when mainstream media outlets like Pitchfork and Stereogum flirted with metal coverage, and whether intentionally or not (depends who you ask), Ghost Bath duped everyone into thinking they were from China for a year or so (they’re from North Dakota). Thusly duped, no more metal coverage (except Deafheaven) ever again! What I witnessed of Ghost Bath’s set was fairly traditional stuff; I gotta say this is one band whose lyrics are probably best screamed as unintelligibly as possible, they are gruesomely depressive.
Next up was Biohazard in The Rave proper, a band I’d somehow never seen before. I just never hung out with anyone who was into them; if it weren’t for the JUDGMENT NIGHT soundtrack I might never have heard a single note. And they didn’t play that song Sunday, nor did they lean into the hip-hop side of their sound, but amazingly enough, this was the classic lineup from the band’s ‘90s heyday. Their new material (comeback album DIVIDED WE FALL arrived in October of last year) fit very comfortably with the oldies; the crowd responded just as enthusiastically to “Fuck The System” as to the URBAN DISCIPLINE tunes. Biohazard play more of a hardcore/crossover style, one of the more political acts on the bill but also the least self-serious. Lest the proceedings become too grim, this was sort of the party interlude of the evening.
Next up was Suffocation, good old-fashioned brutal death metal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, drummer John Longstreth made the biggest impression; a longtime member of Origin, he just stepped in as of last month to replace a very disgruntled Eric Morotti and might be the most technically impressive drummer Suffocation has ever had, although he’s currently only a “very special guest” for the tour. Following this it was Exodus back on the main floor. The band’s set at Milwaukee Metal Fest last year was shortly after they’d fired vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza and rehired Rob Dukes, and while Dukes did a fine job, he still struck me as not having quite re-gelled with the band yet. Sunday night, with a new album under their belt with Dukes, Exodus were a fully-functioning unit again, founding drummer Tom Hunting still making Lars Ulrich seem like an oafish adolescent, guitarist Gary Holt shredding away. Dukes is the least-cartoonish Exodus vocalist and he showed off his prowess much better at this show than last year; no other singer they’ve had could pull off a song like “Goliath” (the title track of the new album), and I doubt even this lineup would’ve dared a year ago.
Back in the basement afterwards, the moment many attendees had been waiting for: Cradle Of Filth. I went in with a long history of disliking this band, although after decades of trying not to pay any attention to them I’ve all but forgotten why I hated them in the first place. I just remember when they first came to Milwaukee in ‘97 my neighbor at The Buckingham (an East Side apartment building I’d recently moved into) was beside herself with excitement and she played me DUSK… AND HER EMBRACE and I… hated it. And then other people I knew also hated them so it was pretty easy to keep that act up. Sunday was my first time actually watching them perform, and I realized a couple things quickly. For one, Dani Filth is sort of like the Joanna Newsom of extreme metal; there will be loads of people who’ll hear his vocal style and be so instantly turned off that they can’t possibly give his music a fair shake. For another thing, the band Ghost probably never could’ve gotten to where they are if Cradle Of Filth hadn’t preceded them in the commercialization-of-Satan game. In a sense, Filth’s approach to metal has been to Tim-Burtonize it; the darkness has a distinct fairy-tale lining, which will also turn off the super grim and macho dudes of metal. But those dudes are very much losing their grip on metal, whereas when Filth came on the scene in the ‘90s they had it in a stranglehold. You could almost look at Dani as a Weird Al figure of the scene; adept in all the styles, never meant to be taken seriously—not that Weird Al would ever make t-shirts that said “Jesus Is A Cunt” but you get my drift. Even though the group’s notoriety peaked many years ago, I’m still glad I finally got to witness the circus. I definitely don’t have any hate for Cradle any more.
All that remained was Sepultura, one of the first bands in the extreme realm that I ever fell for. It’s been a long, strange trip for them as well; only bassist Paulo Jr. remains from the group’s earliest stable lineup, although lead guitarist Andreas Kisser has been in the fold since their second album. The group announced its farewell tour in late 2023, prompting drummer Eloy Casagrande to quit the band three days before the tour to join Slipknot; his replacement, Greyson Nekrutman, makes Sepultura fully half-American at this supposedly final stage. Vocalist Derrick Green, a Cleveland native, took over when founding singer Max Cavalera quit in ’97 and has made Sepultura his own against all odds. I admit I was skeptical when I first went to see him front the band a quarter-century ago, but he won me over that very night; he can pull off all the old stuff as well as the plentiful worthy material he’s made with the band across his nine albums with them now.
Do we believe this is really the end? No, we don’t; many fans naturally are already hoping/predicting that Kisser and Jr. will reunite with Cavalera and his brother, drummer Igor, the two actual founders of Sepultura, and give us all “what we want”, as the saying goes. But the Cavalera brothers seem pretty happy working together in Cavalera Conspiracy; they just did a tour celebrating re-recordings they made of the first two Sepultura albums, which had to be a nice full-circle moment for them. I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to those re-recordings, myself; early Sepultura was life-changing for me and I don’t wanna hear a George-Lucas-ized reimagining, please stop DOING this everyone (except Sting, I know he’ll never stop). The truth is, I don’t have much desire for this fabled reunion. No hate against Soulfly, but if that project was a good representation of where Max wanted to take Sepultura, then I remain content that he left. Sure, there’s a small part of me that would still love to see Max roar the old songs, and maybe with Sepultura “retired”, that can come to pass.
The current Sepultura, however, was as good as I could’ve possibly hoped on Sunday. The setlist stretched all the way back to 1987’s SCHIZOPHRENIA and included two songs from the brand-new THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING EP, touching on every noteworthy release in between, saving the classic ‘90s cuts for the latter portion of the set. They even brought out members of Biohazard to join in on “Kaiowas”, the celebrated percussion jam that in 1993 was rather a bold move for a metal band. While generally rooted in thrash, Sepultura’s early work was harsher and more extreme than most bands of its ilk, but by the ‘90s they’d already shifted to a more accessible sound, ultimately influencing the best AND worst subgenres to arise in their wake. (There was a metalcore/nu-metal band on the bill but I didn’t get there in time to see Cultus Black; sorry!)
The tour is called “Celebrating Life Through Death” and it was indeed a celebration through and through. No encore, just a sludgy wallop of “Roots Bloody Roots”, and then the house lights came on, with a surprise kicker: Phil Collins’ “Easy Lover” blasting on the P.A. The setlist may have been a bit predictable but nobody saw THIS coming! Whether or not I get to see some version of this band play again, I’d really be kicking myself if I hadn’t gone. Sepultura’s glory days may be over but they always had a lot more to say than most metal bands and they’re clearly still as passionate about the message as the music, both of which aspects have aged remarkably well. And now that The Rave has improved literally every aspect of the experience there over the past two decades or so, it was even the best-sounding Sepultura set I ever heard.
I guess I’m ready for the reunion tour whenever.