Sunday Sesh: The Drummer/Vocalist Episode
If you attended any kind of metal show, but especially a metalcore or burn-out thrash show, in the range of 2006-2012, there’s a very good chance that you caught buttmetal workhorses 2 cents. They must have opened for four or five touring acts in the years I lived in Lubbock, and their set was largely the same thing every single time: trite riffs, jokes about how Katy Perry and Fallout Boy and pop music are the enemy (littered with homophobic and/or misogynistic zingers, of course), and a Slayer cover. It wasn’t good, but there is one thing about the band that always struck me as a bit perplexing; during their early years, their drummer was also their vocalist. It’s an arrangement that tends to impress me no matter the caliber of the rest of the band’s output (though not enough to overlook everything else that’s bad about 2 cents). This post is dedicated to all the Karen Carpenters and Don Henley‘s out there in the world of metal.
Thankfully, we’ve got better ambassadors for the drummer/vocalist combo than the chud in 2 cents. Like Absu, for one. Proscriptor McGovern’s two contributions to the legendary Texan black metal act, and metal canon at large), are his frenetic blasts and his Gollum-being-tortured-in-the-dungeons-of-Barad-dur vocals. There’s something about hearing McGovern shriek a banshee wail over a driving line of blasts, but it’s even more impressive live where you can see just how draining the arrangement really is.
Lately, though, I’ve been most impressed by up-and-comers Tomb Mold after Toilet Pal Utmu tipped me off to the sheer spectacle of Max Klebanoff snarling about the bad old blood and gitting gud while laying down a massive groove for his fellow weird death compatriots to create their singular brand of skin-boiling and dungeon-crawling death metal. I’ve yet to see the band live myself, but footage like this has me utterly transfixed. There’s just something magnetic about this unwieldy arrangement, and I hope they never change.
So what’s your favorite drummer/vocalist combo? The floor is yours.
