When I arrived at Indy's Jukebox - a little-known dive on Prospect Street in the shadow of Lucas Oil Stadium - I thought my review of The Gates of Slumber show was going to be a piece about an erstwhile prodigal son's reclaiming of a lost metal identity. Middle-aged fat guys with skullets and Mercyful Fate shirts smoking cigarettes and pounding PBRs dominated the crowd, and I was reminded of an entire sect of metal culture that I had forgotten about. Since getting into the genre when I was 12, I've gravitated toward what is derogatorily referred to as "hipster metal" by the true metal legions but what I simply think of as critically acclaimed metal, the kind of stuff that Brandon Stosuy and Lars Gotrich shower with praise but the longhair at the Circle K thinks is for art school fags. I always thought Indianapolis doom metal trio The Gates of Slumber bridged the gap between these crowds, but based on the turnout at their gig, I may be that bridge's sole plank.
If last night did anything, it made me drastically reconsider my romanticized notion of the noble savage metalhead. The guys who I see as modern true metal warriors - Hammers of Misfortune's John Cobbett, High on Fire's Matt Pike, Slough Feg's Mike Scalzi - all seem like sensitive, educated dudes whose allegiance to the Almighty Riff is more likely an aspect of a complex worldview than something to slink into after a long shift at the factory and just before a Budweiser-induced blackout. I risk sounding offensive even typing that sentence, but the anti-intellectualism that exists in the segment of the metal audience that shows up for these gigs - as opposed to, say, the segment who reads Invisible Oranges - has begun to make me feel like an outsider in the scene that first accepted me because I was an outsider.
I know all that's beside the point of the music, but it's crucial context for understanding what it was like in that room. Today, apart from my usual bangover (that's when your neck hurts the day after you headbang, for you uninitiated ones) I'm also wheezing out secondhand smoke. To describe the scene at Indy's Jukebox as a time warp to the late '70s isn't exactly fair, because that would imply that most of the people in that garb were young. In fact, most of them were wearing the jackets they bought in 1976. Again, very cool from a distance, and easy to romanticize, but ultimately bad for the genre.
The first band of the night was Bloomfield's Thorr-Axe, a High on Fire-worshiping trio who I had seen in Bloomington once before. For their set, I was in the mood, raising my own PBR can high as I heshed out to the heavy, smoky riffs. At this point, I was thinking about that "welcome back to the fold" column. That was before the next band, Old Vikings, took to the stage. They played godawful third-rate Lamb of God bullshit. The singer wore a Harley Davidson shirt and macho-postured his way around the crowd, and the most enthusiastic member of the audience during their set was a guy in camouflage cutoffs who took to pretending to hit a punching bag during the plentiful mosh parts. I would have been heartened if the denim-clad crowd hated this terrible band and booed them, but that isn't what happened. Old Vikings got basically the same response as the far superior Thorr-Axe, and I was reminded of the totally undiscerning "as long as it's heavy" attitude of so many metalheads. Not to overreact, but it was fairly crushing.
After my metal culture angle was shot down, I was able to focus entirely on the music that was going on. Thankfully, the last two acts of the night were both terrific. Long-running Crawfordsville black metal squad Hordes of Nebulah blasted through a half hour of Immortal/Darkthrone-nodding fury, with frontman Saprophyt making Jack Black faces through the entirety of the set. The smoky bar was briefly transformed into a surrogate Blashrykh as Hordes' four metal lifers blasted through their allotted time without a hint of reprieve. How and why a strictly black metal act hails from Crawfordsville, Ind., is beyond me, but Satan bless Hordes of Nebulah.
The Gates of Slumber finally took the stage at about 1 a.m., and their set was well worth the long wait and accompanying overwrought self-reflection. There's a reason Conqueror may be my favorite doom metal album of all time and why the Indy natives are perennial Decibel year-end list favorites. 45 minutes of crushing, low-end-heavy metal with guitar god soloing by frontman Karl Simon ensued once the trio finally tuned up, and the thinning crowd responded adoringly. The set ignored 2009's Hymns of Blood and Thunder entirely and was perhaps a bit too heavy on material from the recent The Wretch, but the older cuts - "The Jury," "Ice Worm" and "Trapped in the Web" - were transcendent in their heaviness. The night wound down and finally ended at 2 a.m., and despite being a bit torn between the excellent sets by Hordes of Nebulah and especially The Gates of Slumber and how out-of-place I felt in a venue that could ostensibly have ended up as my stomping grounds, I was satisfied with how the evening went.
I suppose there's room in metal for all sorts of folks. I'll keep reading Pitchfork and looking for the next band to radically shift the black metal paradigm, and the unwashed many, who long ago resolved to drop out of life with bong in hand, will continue to give no fucks about what room the wolves are in. If The Gates of Slumber is the only band that brings us together, so be it. I can withstand just about anything for anything that rocks that hard.
Complete The Gates of Slumber setlist:
The Scovrge of Drvnkenness
Ice Worm
The Jury
Day of Farewell
The Wretch
Coven of Cain
Trapped in the Web
Post by Brad Sanders; photo of New York performance courtesy of theobelisk.net
