Boris with Coliseum @ Metro

Boris w/Coliseum
Where: Metro
When: October 19th, 2011
Grade: 5 out of 5 meatballs
Reviewed by: Pawl Schwartz
Photographed by: Aaron Ehinger

What a stormy fucking night. Not a nice or pretty storm at all — this storm is mean. Cold and soggy with blasts of wind that last for up to a full fucking minute at speeds that verge on hurricane. I’m freezing my ass off pounding the concrete to the venue, but all I can think is how perfect the night is for Tera Melos, Coliseum, and Boris to warm up Chicago’s faces by melting them the fuck off.

I got there early so that I could get some words from Ryan Patterson, lead singer and guitarist of Coliseum, who has a new EP coming out called Parasites. Ryan is a tall, thick biker-looking guy with a mostly bald head and a beard of about a foot in length. His demeanor couldn’t be more the opposite; he’s an excitable little posi-punk on the inside.

“It’s eight songs. The majority of it was recorded last summer with Inner Ear in DC. We had a mix up with recording last minute and got the opportunity to record there. We pretty much wrote the songs on the record just because we got that opportunity. We wrote three new songs and then re-recorded an old one. Then we had three songs that were leftover from the last record session. This still wasn’t enough, so we recorded one more song in May to round it out… it’s kind of a mishmash of different stuff, but I think that makes it kinda the perfect EP. There are songs you would never hear on a record, a different side of Coliseum."

“This is our fifth show with Boris. We are all big fans of them. We’ve known them for a while. When we toured Japan in 2009 with Torch, Boris let us use their backline for free. So, we were able to use all of their amazing equipment for free. To me they are like the perfect band, because they are obviously a heavy band, but they go in all directions, you know? It’s just music. It reminds me of My Bloody Valentine a lot live. The people that come to the shows aren’t specifically looking for one sound, and that is what Coliseum tries to do as a band, to be able to do whatever we want to do musically."

Before this EP I would have thought it weird to hear Ryan talk about a varied, eclectic sound. Coliseum has its own sound, sure, but they have kept that sound steady for four records now. But on this lucky night, the EP arrived in the mail and was sold for the first time. I may have even been the first customer.

I can’t say enough good about this EP. I love to see a band reaching like this, throwing aside musical constraints and just making music they love. Heavy music just sprouted a new gem with this one; equal parts indie inventiveness and Louisville Hardcore, this is an interesting and beautiful behemoth. The color splatter on the record is one of the sweetest looking I’ve seen, and for all you audiophiles, rejoice, for this is a 12” 45. Maximum quality sound right there. Snatch this shit up people, Parasites shows a Coliseum that is more expansive and ambitious than ever.

Coliseum opens the show and has a great reception. Kids in the audience know the lyrics, and the band is more energetic than I’ve seen them in a long time. Ryan Patterson’s trademark grimace is spread across his face as he bellows into the mic and traces a half circle around it as he stomps his foot. Even when he breaks a string, he just rolls with it, using it for an extra brutal pick slide, ripping it out, then moving on with the song. They open with some old school songs, the ones I know the best. This is a band that is close to my heart, that I have seen develop over literally years, and that never ceases to impress the living shit out of me.

Tera Melos is a band that I haven’t seen for a couple of years. All that I honestly remembered about them going in was that they were technical metal, and that they had toured with Foxy Shazam a couple of years ago. Boy, was I ready to have my expectations blown the fuck away. Far from the typical mathy fare I was expecting, Nick Reinhart is a master of his own style. His guitar breaks (mostly used for fakeouts, sadly) have that kind of almost arhythmic, rhythmic complexity that you only understand after years of Captain Beefheart re-listens. I am being a little unfair saying that he only uses this skill for fakeouts, because his frenzied guitar is often worked into the fabric of the songs, just not all of them. It irks me to see another band lay the weird and interesting side by side with the catchy, instead of really mixing them into their own style. Intensely unpredictable, obsessively interesting.   

Reinhart is also a master of pedals and facial expressions. Every tap on his guitar or from his foot on the pedal board draws a new look of absolute surprise from his face, as if he startles himself with his own improvisation. The effect is, honestly, pretty wonderful.

But to only talk about the off-time jams side of this band would be a crime, because these parts only amplify the technical masterpiece of memorization and style that is Tera Melos. Every member (especially drummer John Clardy) is locked in with one another while still maintaining their own personal dynamics. Together they weave a tapestry that is delicate as porcelain in its execution, while still coming off as beefy as a female ICP fan in sound. 

After all this utter ear-candy, came the wait for Boris. Luckily, I found a spot right up front while people were milling around. I knew that this could turn out to be unlucky, but I didn’t really care. It didn’t take them long to get up on stage and come rocketing out of the gate with their first song, the undeniably catchy Korusu.

I already knew going in that Boris uses volume as its own instrument, but now they’ve convinced me of something that I never really thought about before. Heavy music is a drug, and the listener of heavy music hears and experiences music differently. It hit me pretty early on in the show when second guitarist Michio Kurihara went way up the neck for one of his eardrum-shattering spaced-out solos (one of about fifteen in their hour and a half set), and I got this sense of vertigo and lightheadedness when I could really feel the notes rattling my unprotected eardrums (which is impressive, because my hearing is already shot to shit). Sure, I’ve had incredibly loud sounds hit me like that at shows before, but it wasn’t till this time that I realized how much it felt like taking a strong hit of weed. If the brain can be affected by simple binaural beats, imagine what these unnaturally overamplified sounds do to it? The listener of heavy music engages with it in a more physical and bodily way; it is literally a rush and a high to see. Never has this been more obvious than during a Boris show, when your clothes are flapping around you with the vibrations and every chord explodes like a marshmallow in a microwave until it fills the whole theater like one oppressive, dank cloud. Tweens pass each other out by applying pressure to the neck; horses hyperventilate and rock back and forth in their stalls for a buzz; humans can come back for a buzz over and over and not even realize that is what they are getting. This also helps to explain all of the religious and moral brew-ha-ha over the years with every new genre of loud music.

Boris drummer Asuto becomes the Japanese Richard Simmons during their fast songs. He has a head mic that he screams into as if he is leading a cardio class for heavy metal drummers. I feel like I should start running in place when he screams along. This brings up the only bad thing about Boris’ show, however; it tends to sag when these fast parts fade to slow chords. Not just in the middle, but at two or three different points when those extra-long songs come out and turn into a slow, hard slapping of aural waves in the face. It is truly a thing to experience every chord vibrate your hair and clothing to near oblivion, but anything can become monotonous when done for long enough.

The actual show really lives up to the hype of “amplifier worship.” I think the term applies perfectly to Boris, because it does not put any of the typical genre constraints on the band; it just refers to the general theme of overloaded, distorted and incredibly loud music with meticulous focus given to the amplification, the same way a record nerd will obsess over their hi-fi setup. This allows for Boris’ show to drift from style to style as effortlessly as it does, from psychedelic washes of fuzz that will bring you back to Jefferson Airplane shows you never attended, to hyper thrash metal with grunged-out thick guitars. As their set ends, people chant for an encore, which in my experience Boris does not tend to do. Again, they do not.

I leave thinking that Ryan Patterson couldn’t have been more right about this show: every band is pursuing its own sonic vision, not trying to cater to any genre. And that is a beautiful, rare and unique thing to find in heavy music. Do not miss any of these acts, they are already out beyond the boundaries of genre showing the future not how to mimic them, but how to create something that reflects the artists rather than their inspirations or genre constraints.

Click here to download "Waiting (Too Late" from Coliseum's latest release, Parasites E.P.!

COLISEUM "Waiting (Too Late)" Music Video from Coliseum on Vimeo.