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Heavier than thou
The New England Metal and Hardcore Fest
BY CARLY CARIOLI

Every booking agent thinks their band is heavy, but we’ve had to turn down a lot of them," says Jon Peters, the independent promoter whose MassConcerts books the annual New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, the sixth edition of which takes place at the Palladium in Worcester next weekend. Heavy, of course, is relative: the emo-metal band 36 Crazyfists are sort of heavy, but Peters had to tell the band’s agent they didn’t make the cut. " ‘They’re just not heavy enough for this! You don’t understand!’ We’ve pissed some people off. But that [exclusiveness] is why people like it, and those bands wouldn’t get a good response even if they played."

The festival usually sells out in advance, and in some cases Peters has had to accommodate last-minute arrivals from as far away as Mexico and Europe. In recent years, he’s also had to compete with OzzFest for talent. "The underground stuff has gotten more mainstream — the history of music is like that — but we’ve always gotten bands early. The people going to the festival, the real connoisseurs, are very knowledgeable. We get e-mail from people critiquing the nuances of the line-up — ‘This band should be playing after this one,’ or, ‘You should bring over these Norwegian bands’ — and we respond as best as we can. We get the Syndicate, the radio promotions company, to send out a poll to college radio stations to see who they want to see, and then we try to get them. This year, a lot of bands had to do OzzFest instead, but the line-up is still really good."

There’s no better example of the intertwining of the festival and underground metal than next Friday’s headliners, Massachusetts’s own Killswitch Engage: Peters booked them when they were kids, and Killswitch’s Mike D has designed the festival’s logo since the beginning. The band have gone from regional faves to kings of MTV2’s Headbangers Ball, and next month Roadrunner will release The End of Heartache, which carries the legacy of ’80s Metallica and ’90s Pantera into the 21st century. Friday’s other notables are fellow Headbangers Ball tour alums God Forbid, who are touring behind their new Gone Forever (Century Media), and Swedish thrash overlords Arch Enemy. The 25 bands on the undercard include former Shadows Fall singer Philip Labonte’s All That Remains; New York’s Every Time I Die, a rancorous outfit who’ve brought sleaze-metal insouciance to screamo; and Cattle Decapitation, a gleefully gory vegan grindcore band.

Saturday’s day-long line-up features headliners Iced Earth, a long-running classicist-metal outfit from Florida whose latest album introduces a new singer familiar to old-school metal fans: Ripper Owens, the young buck who went from singing in a Judas Priest cover band to singing in the actual Judas Priest, then was let go after original frontman Rob Halford returned to the fold. The 50 or so acts playing before them span the metal and hardcore universe. There’s vampire-themed screamo from Bleeding Through; straight-up tough-guy hardcore from Terror; New Orleans swampfuckery from Soilent Green; and female-sung grindcore from Walls of Jericho. And there’s Evergreen Terrace, a Florida metalcore band whose just-released Writers Block (Eulogy) is curious hodge-podge of covers ranging from the Smashing Pumpkins’ "Zero" and Hum’s "Stars" to Michael Sembello’s ’80s pop hit "Maniac" and Operation Ivy’s "Knowledge."

The New England Metal and Hardcore Festival runs next Friday, April 30 (beginning at 2 p.m.), and Saturday, May 1 (beginning at noon), at the Palladium, 261 Main Street in Worcester. Tickets are $30 for Friday, $35 for Saturday, or $60 for a two-day ticket; call (800) 477-6849.


Issue Date: April 23 - 29, 2004
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