Weekend of Champions (Part II)

Right between my house and this venue. Thank the gods.

I promised you part II — now I deliver! Back-​to-​back show week­ends are exhausting and won­derful, I had to be careful or my liver would dessi­cate. You’ll notice that the quality of the pic­tures tends to dete­ri­o­rate along­side my sobriety…so, apolo­gies for the fuzzy snapshots!

This show was orig­i­nally slated to have Faces of Bayon, a local psy­che­delic doom act, play a set — unfor­tu­nately, their drummer, Matt Davis, passed away unex­pect­edly ear­lier that week. As a result, this became a tribute show (and warmed my heart a little).

First up was Cacophonous Death, who were far and away the most fash­ion­able band of the evening. Shredded acid wash jeans, studded gauntlets, and armored epaulets all up in this bitch! They’re a very riff-​based, black­ened death band from Cape Cod, their stage pres­ence reminded me a little bit of Cannibal Corpse but with a lot more sass and a healthy injec­tion of black metal. Will def­i­nitely come out ofr these guys again.

Cacophonous Death

Bein’ sassy.

Summoning Hate fol­lowed and brought the thrash, they played a really tight set and I enjoyed every minute. The thing that stuck out the most to me with this band was their gui­tarist — nobody who looks this chilled out should be able to shred as hard as this guy did.

Summoning Hate

Too Zen to be rocking that hard.

Our head­liner for the evening was Scalpel, giving us our daily dose of grind, with some death metal influ­ences thrown in for good mea­sure. The crowd got really into this act — they just threw down a great set, a pit opened up and Alonso the vocalist invited lots of audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion by calling our mothers whores in Spanish.

Scalpel

A small pit opened up and everyone jock­eyed to get at the mic and sing along. :)

Thanks to everyone for an awe­some show!

(Surprise, I’m stum­bling back out to Champions again this weekend to see Upsidedown Cross! If you don’t hear from me next week, I’m surely dead in a ditch somewhere.)