Photos by Nathan Smith

Kylesa

Kylesa, Blood Ceremony, White Hills, Lazer/Wulf
Walters Houston
May 16, 2013

Ever notice how some weeks just never seem to end? There's nothing worse. On those occasions when each and every workday feels scientifically engineered to kick your ass, Thursdays can be the longest days of all: the weekend is just far enough away to sadistically taunt you to your face without fear that you'll reach out and strangle it to death.

On Thursdays like that, when all you want to do is fast-forward to Friday, some heavy music and a few brews beats an evening at home watching sitcom finales ten times out of ten. Maybe 11. Luckily, Kylesa -- one of Georgia's top purveyors of experimental sludge -- trudged into Walters last night to stomp some mud off their boots, and brought a stacked bill along with them that was willing and able to sacrifice another workweek to Satan a full day ahead of schedule.

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Photos by Groovehouse

Cannibal Corpse

Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death, Immolation
Fitzgerald's
May 10, 2013

By the time the clock struck 9 p.m. at Fitzgerald's on Friday night, it didn't appear possible to cram another black T-shirt into the place. Longhairs were already stacked up past the rafters inside the old club on White Oak, even as a steady stream of the same continued to file up the stairs.

Are there casual fans of death metal? I didn't see any on Friday. The Decibel Magazine Tour's opening night, featuring a fearsome triple stack of extreme-metal icons, was more than a concert to many of these folks. It was a celebration of an entire gore-obsessed lifestyle. Adherents showed up expecting the sickest, sweatiest, hairiest show of the year on Friday, and that was exactly what they got.

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Greenway, foreground, with Napalm Death

Most of the people who pass Mark "Barney" Greenway in the street every day almost certainly have no idea what the man does for a living. His sensible haircut, unassuming demeanor and soft-spoken Birmingham accent betray nothing of his status as one of the most ferocious and accomplished voices in the gruesome history of extreme metal.

For the past 23 years, however, Greenway has toured the world as the front man for Napalm Death, the grindcore originators who have continuously pushed the boundaries of abrasive sound in every direction. Tonight, Greenway and company hit town to shatter eardrums as part of the Decibel Magazine tour featuring death-metal heavyweights Immolation and headlined by those godfathers of gore, Cannibal Corpse.

Each band has built a notorious legacy of brutality dating back to the '80s, making tonight's bill a showcase of underground legends. Just don't call it a nostalgia tour.

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Ed. Note: Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman, a founding member of the band, passed away Thursday in Southern California due to liver failure, according to Rolling Stone. Hanneman, 49, had contracted the flesh-eating disease necrotizing fasciitis, which doctors believed was the result of a spider bite, and stepped away from Slayer in early 2011. In late September 2010, he was part of the Jagermeister tour that stopped by Verizon Wireless Theater (now Bayou Music Center) with Megadeth and Anthrax. Former Rocks Off staffer Craig Hlavaty brought us this report.

Photos by Groovehouse

Slayer live is a force of sound, probably the closest you can get to true calamity without being outright noise. Like a freight train, there are no stops. If you get hit or run over, that's the breaks.

But, Good Lord, does it have a groove to it. We are probably only one of seven people in the world who think Slayer has a head-nodding, hip-shake to their music. A band stamping on human ear drums forever. And of course we had to be on the barricade.

The band began their set with "Hate Worldwide" and the title track from from last year's World Painted Blood. A man behind us screamed every single lyric in our ear, while a father and his 11-year-old son threw up metal horns and headbanged.

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Photo courtesy of MSO PR

It seems so fitting that the most exciting year in Black Sabbath news since they hooked up with Dio again in 2007 ends with the number "13." That's also the name of the band's new record, which undoubtedly you've already heard the first single, "God Is Dead?", if you're a Sab fan at all.

"God is Dead?" is a crushing, nine-minute saga examining the writings of Nietzsche that went a long way toward restoring the faith of those of us wondering if a reunion with Ozzy after all these years could turn out worth listening to. In case you also missed this bit of news, Black Sabbath is opening the U.S. portion of their world tour in Houston July 25 at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion.

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Photos by Jim Bricker

Anthrax, Exodus
House of Blues
April 10, 2013

I am going to come right out and say it: I never thought Anthrax should have been a part of The Big Four.

When laying out the titans of thrash metal, the boys from New York -- a fact they never seem to want you to forget -- always seemed a bit out of place next to their three California brethren: Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth.

Anthrax's quirky pop-culture and comic-book references and that odd predilection for imitating the Beastie Boys just never sat quite right. They seemed too Sunset Strip in their Joey Belladonna era and too Biohazard in the John Bush years.

So I always had a silly, largely baseless, reason to marginalize Anthrax. In my 14-year-old mind, the coveted fourth spot rightfully belonged to Testament, Exodus or maybe even the babies of the Bay Area scene, Death Angel.

You are about to read something I don't admit very often. I was wrong. I may be more than a couple of decades too late in my realization, but hearing Anthrax play Among the Living in its entirety Wednesday night was worthy of an epiphany, and it was certainly a moment worth waiting for.

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Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera
By Rex Brown
Da Capo Press, 304 pp., $15.47

Back in Pantera's '90s heyday, few fans would have guessed that the first guy to write a tell-all history of the band would be Rex Brown.

Though an indivisible component of Pantera's larger-than-life crunch, the bassist was always the band's most reclusive member, seemingly uninterested in the media coverage and controversy courted by the group's louder personalities.

Given the band's turbulent relations toward the end, however, maybe Rex was the only man for the job. He was there from the group's earliest days to its last, when band relations got so bad that frontman Phil Anselmo and brothers Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul found themselves unable to pick up a phone and call one another, let alone get together in the same room.

By his own assertion, Brown served as mediator and go-between through it all, giving him perhaps the most complete view of the band's greatest triumphs and most devastating losses.

In his new book, Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera, the bassist spills the goods on all of it, starting with the band's absolute nadir: the onstage murder of guitarist Dimebag Darrell at the hands of a mentally ill fan.

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Photos by Joshua Justice

Fuck the Facts' Mel Mongeon

While much of Houston was embroiled in NBA All-Star Weekend, the north end of downtown was operating on an entirely different end of the spectrum as Walter's hosted its Badass Weekend. Packed with over 30 bands across two days, the show boasted hardcore, noise and grindcore acts from all over the country and even as far off as Canada.

The event, brought out over 750 attendees over the course of the two-day event, which overflowed to afterparty shows at the House of Creeps warehouse compound down the street.

Rocks Off headed over to Walter's early on Friday night to make sure we caught Rusted Shut and Fuck the Facts.

As it turned out, Rusted Shut wouldn't play that evening.

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Walters' new location finally has a head of steam. A frighteningly long downtime followed the shuttering of the Washington Avenue location, and some began to fear a new one would never materialize. Sure enough, the new location finally opened it's doors at 1120 Naylor late in 2011, just north of UH-Downtown.

While it may have taken a while to get back up to speed, events like the recent Southern Lord records showcase and an Island Reunion weekend have brought out increasingly large crowds. What started as a slow burn has begun to build into a bonfire, restoring Walters' status to close to the storied history of Walter's on Washington.

If the past year has been building, this weekend's two day "Bad Ass Weekend" event may be Walters' true coming-out party. Booked by Jaron Sayers of Treaty Oak Collective and boasting more than 30 bands, the party will not only encompass Walters, but two afterparty shows at the nearby House of Creeps compound.

Sayers has absolutely packed this bill with bands from all over the map, so that the show offers everything -- as long as what you want is loud, fast and punishing.

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They sound exactly like this looks.

Unless you're actively seeking out the absolute gnarliest music you can find, it's easy to forget that there's a whole world of extreme sounds out there, roiling just underground. Local grindcore destructors P.L.F. (neé Pretty Little Flower) have seen a pretty big chunk of that world. Since forming in 1999, guitarist/vocalist Dave Callier's trio of rage-aholics has toured the U.S. seven times and Europe three times. This year, the band plans to add Australia to the list.

That's a pretty long reach for a group plying the most excruciating mutation of heavy metal yet imagined, but if you want your music heard in a scene as tight-knit and far-flung as grindcore, you go to where the audiences are.

"I sometimes compare it to people who are really into extreme horror movies or really into hot sauce," Callier says. "They're more in a minority around the world than people who are into regular food or regular movies. But people who are into that stuff are like freaks about it."

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