Neurosis’ Performance Overshadows Pantera
Pantera Monday, Feb. 3, Convention Center
Neurosis is the future of heavy music.
Not since Pink Floyd has a band single-handedly assembled webbed, imagery-laced music, concepts and visuals into a provocative sensory experience.
Monday at the sold-out Spokane Convention Center, the apocalyptic, post-hard-core ensemble waged its audio-visual battery on an unsuspecting crowd.
Endless tsunamis of noise crested over the walls of speakers, steamrolled the audience and ricocheted off the concrete walls of the Convention Center. It created a feeling of treading water in a whirlpool of chaos.
With just three songs - “Through Silver and Blood,” “Eye” and “Purify” - Neurosis built a factory of machinelike, trance-inducing rhythms with a trio of guitars, percussion and synthesized sounds.
Headliner Pantera, on the other hand, detonated explosive and relentless riffs during its set. The band, fronted by throaty vocalist Phillip Anselmo, wasn’t clever about its attack. Pantera sprung like a blood-hungry grizzly and mauled the crowd.
But the songs quickly bled together. There really weren’t any distinguishing characteristics among them. There were no hooks. Ultimately, the dissonance left people in a comatose state.
Heavy music isn’t just about punishing riffs played with brutal precision, and Neurosis demonstrated this.
Although they’re sparse, underlying hooks and melodies are employed by Neurosis to lure the listener in. And the combination of music, noises and visuals working in symbiotic harmony demands the concertgoer’s attention.
On Monday, the combo’s brooding music echoed chilling images of emptiness, isolation, desolation and mass destruction, as well as anti-Christian sentiments (No, they’re not devil worshippers). Neurosis closed out “Through Silver and Blood” with the refrain, “Don’t crawl/ to seek his burn of war/ when the fallout comes/ he is fire.”
Pete Inc., the Neurosis visual specialist, augmented the overall darkness by projecting fragmented and distorted images onto a massive white screen with two 16-millimeter film projectors and and four slide projectors.
Fortifying the Oakland sextet’s ear-splitting barrage is percussion. Band members pounded on their instruments as if they were drums. On a couple of occasions, guitarists-vocalists Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till put their guitars aside to beat on some monster drums.
The one downside to Neurosis’s 33-minute opening set was that the cruddy Convention Center acoustics drowned out some of the band’s subtleties, such as the bagpipes that closed out “Purify.”
The one thing interesting about Clutch’s set was not its music, which was bottom-heavy boredom. Rather, it was an overzealous mosh pit that forced a couple of barriers between the stage and audience to collapse, causing a 10-minute delay. There were no reported injuries.
, DataTimes