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As I reported last Friday<\/a>, the brothers Cavalera’s 2017 version of the Return to<\/em>\u00a0Roots<\/em>\u00a0tour was making a stop in my dusty little town, and Max and Iggor were bringing\u00a0Immolation\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0Full of Hell<\/strong> along for the ride. Although I knew I couldn’t miss Immolation’s first ever stop in my city, I was intrigued to see Full of Hell’s notoriously frenetic live presence. The biggest question for me, however, was whether or not the weight of nostalgia would be sufficient for me to get down with the aging Cavaleras’ groove.<\/p>\n

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When I got to the venue promptly at 7:00 pm, the alleged show start time, a local band was finishing their set. I never caught the band’s name, but they played a mixture of doom and grind that, with a few year’s practice and some songwriting finesse, could easily hit like a ten-ton hammer. The band was certainly better than most of our local acts, but I needed a beer, so I sashayed over the bar and snagged a Texas IPA. When Full of Hell took the stage, I’d be ready.<\/p>\n

*Note that because my photography skills are practically nonexistent, I’m going to be stealing<\/del> sharing images of each band taken by others much more talented than I.<\/p>\n

Full of Hell<\/h1>\n

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Photo by Jacki Vitetta and taken in Colorado last year (via<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

Beer firmly clutched, I worked my way to the front of the still paltry crowd and took a spot next to some local college kids and scene girls with neon hair just behind the stage barricade. After a brief tune-in and introduction that saw the band bathed in blood-red light and cloaked in a thick morass of swirling electronic noise, vocalist Dylan Walker triggered an unrelenting, 30-minute avalanche of grind riffs and blast beats. Although the setlist drew from the far-flung reaches of the Maryland quartet’s surprisingly deep discography, the collaboration with\u00a0Merzbow<\/strong> seemed to feature heavily in the track list; the band played both “Gordian Knot” and “Thrum in the Deep” from the impossibly heavy album.<\/p>\n

During the band’s set, I found my eyes most drawn to drummer Dave Bland. While guitarist Spencer Hazard and bassist Sam DiGristine chugged, shredded, and juddered through starts and stops dictated by Walker’s frantic shrieks and glowering sneers, Bland blasted away with reckless abandon. His energy was palpable as he rolled his way through fill-heavy sections and devastating groove, only taking brief respites for a between-track feedback loop or audio sample to set the stage for more cosmic violence. By the end of the set, I felt exhausted just looking at Bland, though this easily could have been a side effect of how compelled to headbang the death metal-tinged grind left me. It was a short set, but it certainly set the tone for the whole evening, and although the crowd was slim to start, by the end of the show Walker’s energetic stage presence and commanding snarl had brought in a sizeable fraction of the full attendance that night.<\/p>\n