In February, Atlanta hosted a free, all day, Toyota-funded metal festival at The Masquerade called the “Scion Fest.” My usual companion in metal (the eminent Doctor Jones) and I attended, showing up bright eyed at 11:00 am. I was excited because a number of my favorite bands were playing: Converge, Coalesce, Wolves In The Throne Room, Boris etc. I think it was Lewis Black that I recently heard say that anticipated moments are rarely as good as the anticipation itself. Scion Fest exemplified his philosophy. I remember a few things about that day:

1. It was disgustingly muddy.
2. Someone in line made fun of me by yelling, “Nice muscle shirt!” and I think he might have been right.
3. By 3:00 pm I wanted to go home and take a nap. This made me feel old.
4. During Mastodon’s closing set, it seemed from afar as if Toyota had hired actors to stand on the side of the stage, pretending to love Mastodon. One of these maybe-actors kept “raising the roof” during their set, then turned to someone calling to her off-stage and then returned to the stage with new dance moves more apropos to heavy metal. Large camera cranes loomed above the crowd as Mastodon played their new songs from Crack The Skye. Maybe they were filming a metal car commercial?
5. Vice magazine must have co-sponsored the event because they had volunteers handing out free copies of their Guide to Atlanta. This mini-magazine capitalized on Atlanta’s industrial blight, a photo of an indie girl pretending to give oral sex to a shotgun, ads for strip clubs and cheap beer, a prose style that attempted to be ironic but actually came across as boorish, and several listings of “cool” places to hang out in Atlanta that were listed in the incorrect neighborhoods. In other words, it seemed like someone from New York had written a guide to living in Atlanta for hipsters. I read an article later that summarized Vice’s involvement as the following. Their editorial staff believed Atlanta to be the next urban musical Mecca, but because of this city’s disjointed network of musicians, they took it upon themselves to cultivate their own profitable “scene” here.
6. Krallice were awesome.

A few weeks before, I had purchased Krallice’s self-titled EP. I’ve been a fan of Mick Barr’s guitar work since Crom-Tech and had the opportunity to see Orthrelm play at Mass Art in Boston back in the early 2000s. One New Year’s Eve in Maine, I remember driving around with friends, trying to listen to the entirety of Orthrelm’s OV without stopping. This album is described on wikipedia as, “a single, 45-minute track based on extremely intense repetition.” I personally find that it actually starts to physically hurt to listen to OV after about ten minutes.

Krallice works on an entirely different level than those bands. Live it was stunning. The speed of the band gelled into one sonic wall that actually seemed almost ambient rather than black metal. It is amazing to me that a band can play so fast that the waves of music actually feel like they’re slowing down… as if there was some temporal shift happening. If ever there was phonomancy at work, this is it. Krallice’s set was the highlight of the day, a moment when my anticipation was truly surpassed.

I can’t find an online mp3 of “Cnestorial” but it is the third track on my 2009 Retrospective mix on 8tracks.com.