Village Voice on Locrian NYC Show 4/17/2011

Nice write-up on our Sunday show by Chritopher Weingarten.

Link here.

SLUDGE MATCH
Metal in a meatgrinder
By Christopher Weingarten

Crossing the fertile soil between heavy metal, ambient noise, and weird, disgusting bullshit, this four-band bill at Europa is like an expressionistic rendering of a thunderstorm or slaughterhouse. Leading the pack is Chicago’s wildly prolific Locrian, whose ritualistic, smoke-soaked live show is rooted in metal’s brooding overcast skies, but has a sound that leans more toward meditative drones, spectral hums, ghost rattles, and slow-moving foglike drifts of sludge. Similarly, openers Gnaw have metal’s glass-gargling screeches (courtesy of Khanate’s Alan Dubin), and monster drumming (courtesy Jamie Sykes of Thorr’s Hammer), but lean more toward sprawling, smeary sound pieces that mix traditional doom with a colorful slurry of deafening static, back masked horror, and homemade noisemakers. The bill is rounded out by two more quietly creepy local bands on the perennially chilly, defiantly austere label Wierd Records: The hopelessly (new-)romantic band Blacklist, who’s equal parts wistful and moody, making them like a John Hughes soundtrack to a vampire flick, and Martial Canterel, who embraces the most minimal ends of the darkwave spectrum.