(Editor Note: Due to a technical glitch, the by-line of this review is incorrect on some browsers. The actual author is Brice Ezell.)
“That’s him?” my friend asks me as I indicate George Clarke, the lead singer of Deafheaven, who is standing at the bar with guitarist Kerry McCoy. “The ripped dude with the buzz cut?” I laugh at his incredulity. Unlike any other metal vocalist, Clarke invites a bevy of unique descriptions about himself from the musical press, including winners like “equal parts GAP model and wounded banshee.” My friend can’t help but participate, later going on to describe him as a “Bond villan,” though “without a gold front tooth.”
To his credit, though, just like the salmon pink sleeve art to its incredible sophomore album, Sunbather, Deafheaven doesn’t do a lot to try to seem like a “black metal band” — despite what Clarke’s piercing Nazgul screams might indicate. Clarke dresses sharply, in a button-up black shirt, black jeans, and dressy boots, which he then caps off with a pair of black gloves when he gets on stage. McCoy wears a Cold Cave t-shirt. The band’s rhythm guitarist, Shiv Mehra, plays a Fender Telecaster — far from the humbucker-driven guitars one is likely to see metal bands sporting, such as McCoy’s beautifully honed Gibson Les Paul. And, since this show does take place in Portland, a couple cans of PBR set perched atop Deafheaven’s rumbling amplifiers. The greatest feat of the night, aside from the solid two hours of music the energetic crowd was in full synch with, is that the beer never fell off.
Much like Deafheaven’s ability to usurp conventional genre images, the almost rustic coziness of Portland, Oregon’s Bunk Bar makes it a de-familiarizing experience for anyone who has a history of attending metal shows. The bar/restaurant, well known for its sandwiches (including a particularly tasty Pork Cubano), is situated right along the east side of the Willamette River in Portland’s Industrial District, placing it a ways away from some of the hotter concert venues in the city, including the Crystal Ballroom and the metalhead favorite Dante’s. Five tables are situated in the back of the room, leaving only the bar and a tiny, standing-room-only area for the rest of the concert’s hundred-some attendees. The wall mural backing the stage is a painting of a man walking down train tracks. It’s far from the kind of place one would expect a capital-L-Loud band like Deafheaven to play in, but few of the audience members take notice of the venue’s cloistered aura. Right at 9 pm, with lines flanking both sides of the building, the eager crowd — which includes a pretty awesome number of people sporting Converge shirts — files into the building, buys some reasonably priced beers, and waits. To kill the time, they listen to the curious choice for pre-show music — Purity Ring — as it plays through the bar’s speakers. In a city as attuned to all things hipster as Portland, it’s not hard to find a group of people who like indie electronic to lead into a metal show.
Just after the clock strikes ten, Marriages take the stage. The trio, comprised of ex-Red Sparowes members Emma Ruth Rundle and Greg Burns, along with These Arms Are Snakes’ Chris Common, are a perfect choice to open for Deafheaven, especially considering the lighter side of the musical spectrum explored on Sunbather. Marriages purvey in a dreamy sort of post-rock, helmed by the airy, echoey vocals of Rundle. Being unfamiliar with the band’s work — though quite familiar with Red Sparowes — I was interested to see how its sound would work relative to Deafheaven’s harsher elements, and in the end I was pleased with the results. Major props go to the person responsible for mixing the instruments; excepting Rundle’s vocals, which on occasion I wished were more distinct, all three musicians mesh together yet remain individually distinct, particularly the bass work of Greg Burns, who balances a Flea-like smoothness with the atmospheric quality of fellow ex-Red Sparowes member and Isis bassist Jeff Caxide. Marriages only has one EP, Kitsune, to their name, but their unassuming yet intoxicating live presence is an indication that there’s still plenty to come. The undercurrent of melancholy doom that lingers throughout its set forms an ideal stage for what follows.
Before I describe Deafheaven’s domination of the stage, I should rewind a bit. Before the entire show starts, I walk up to Clarke — who I had interviewed for PopMatters a couple of weeks before — and introduce myself. After talking with him for a little bit, I discover that he had, at one point in his life, had the misfortune of living in my hometown of Bakersfield, CA, a hot, mid-size city in California’s central valley where the air is as hot as it is polluted, with summer temperatures pushing upwards of 115 on a regular basis. “I did time at BHS [Bakersfield High School],” Clarke says with a smug smile, knowing full well that I would get and relate to the prison humor. “Suddenly,” I think to myself as he tells me this, “Sunbather makes a lot more sense.” Having lived in Bakersfield for all of my young life, I can relate to the feeling of wanting to scream—and, to use the final crushing words of Deafheaven’s masterpiece track “Dream House,” wanting to dream.
With this “it’s a small world” encounter still in my head, I push close to the front of the tight crowd as Deafheaven takes the stage. No time is wasted, and as the feet of all five musicians are planted on stage, McCoy begins strumming the opening chords to “Dream House,” and from there the energy only continues to build. The group’s set list, a wise balance of material from Sunbather and its debut, Roads to Judah, comes together in a whole that brings out the best parts of each LP. Despite liking it some, I didn’t immediately love Roads to Judah when I first heard it in 2012 — even Sunbather took some getting used to — but the two album cuts that were chosen for this show (“Unrequited” and “Violet”) are a fine complement to the new stuff. Dreamy yet harsh, intimate yet voluminous, Deafheaven’s music proves to be exactly what this largely hip crowd had expected coming into the concert.
McCoy, Mehra, bassist Stephen Clark, and drummer Daniel Tracy are all at top form on this cramped stage, packing the space with as many sound waves as there are corners for them to reverberate from. Much of the group’s sound centers on McCoy’s guitar, which after seeing it live is a lot more complex than the layered textures of Sunbather might indicate. His chord patterns are fascinating to watch; spanning whole octaves up and down the fretboard, he doesn’t go for the regular barre chords or tremolo picking techniques that many an up-and-coming metal band is likely to default to. At the same time, he doesn’t devolve into boring metal shredder tropes; the technical prowess of his instrument comes in his tasteful restraint. It’s an admirable, oft-overlooked quality in modern metal.
As far as instrumental prowess is concerned, these guys give the audience nothing to complain about. For anyone in want of black metal’s legendary theatricality, however, McCoy’s playing is likely to seem not harsh enough, even though it is indisputably heavy. It’s here where Clarke, clothed in total black, comes in. Just before the drums kick in on “Dream House,” he grabs the microphone stand as a sort of support and leans right into the audience, making direct, chilling eye contact with the pumped-up folks in the front. This countenance doesn’t at all waver throughout the set, and, at times, it even gets a little weird. Like the Phantom of the Opera lamenting his face wounds, Clarke frequently strokes his sweat-slicked visage with his gloved hands. At some points he even sticks his fingers in his mouth, after which he reaches out into the audience to grasp the flailing hands of the more excitable fans, some of whom are trying to mosh (much to the chagrin of those who came to the show because they read that one Pitchfork review). Me, I’m content to have my hands saliva-free, but I’m nonetheless enthralled by Clarke. His performance takes on a whole new life considering that I’m familiar with the lyrics he’s singing, including the show-stealing coda to “The Pecan Tree”: “I am my father’s son/I cannot love/I am no one/It is in my blood.”
It’s easy to see that people are feeling these words, not just hearing them; there’s a real intensity to the room. Yet for all of the portentous weight behind Clarke’s prose, few people leave in terror. As I depart Bunk Bar following the encore, “Violet,” I see smiles exchanged. Through ringing ears I make out exclamations of “Awesome!” and “Incredible!” “It’s been a good tour,” Clarke told me earlier, grinning, as I ask him how the tour is going, which I observe has sold out nearly every other show. Following this concert, the band had to pack up and drive straight through the Oregon night to its hometown of San Francisco, where it had a show the next day. Time has yet to slow down Deafheaven. But so long as it’s going at the whirlwind pace it’s presently at, things are only looking up for these guys, and deservedly so. Far from wanting to dream, it seems that these gentlemen are living it.
Deafheaven Set List:
1. Dream House
2. Irresistible
3. Sunbather
4. Unrequited
5. The Pecan Tree
Encore
6. Violet
