Mares of Thrace + Hellbound Summer Metal Meltdown (May metal update)

The ever-awesome Mares of Thrace are currently on a tour that brings them to Hamilton next Wednesday, May 9. Be there (as in This Ain't Hollywood)! I had the chance to interview guitarist/vocalist Thérèse Lanz recently, and you can read the resulting article here, or in the paper edition of this week's View. Lanz had more to say than the feature could contain, so I'll try to post some extra entertaining quotables here in the next week or so.

In other scimetalvegan news... Hellbound is once again taking to CMFU's airwaves this summer, filling in for Soundtrack to the Apocalypse. The first edition of the Hellbound Summer Metal Meltdown begins this Saturday night at 10:30 pm, with me at the helm. You can listen via the old fashioned FM frequencies or tune in online.

loud ladies and the unease they provoke

Last week I jokingly declared that I live metal. But in a sense it's true. I'm so thoroughly immersed in the metal scene that I sometimes take its conventions for granted and forget that not everyone likes it heavy or can make sense of the imagery that goes along with musical aggression. So I was, I admit, a little surprised at the intense unease provoked by Mares of Thrace's "General Sherman" video when I played it for a few hundred undergrads.

The context was my short lecture on women in punk and new wave, and one of my main points was the gendering of musical genres. However far we've come in the world since the first woman picked up an electric guitar (I wonder who that might have been?), amplification, distortion and (musical) aggression are still understood as masculine phenomena. Admit it - when you see an axe-wielding woman on stage demonstrating her mastery of the guitar you still view this as counter to the norm.

It's partly a matter of numbers. Numerically, women guitarists are still under-represented. But there are deeper cultural codings at work that make women who like it heavy and loud seem to be gender misfits with uncharacteristic tastes. (As I'm one of those 'grrrls' the subject has been on my mind for a while, and I was first inspired to write about women in metal for UW's Imprint many many moons ago.)

Nevermind that almost no one in the class had heard of the early 90s women's counterpoint to grunge, Riot Grrrl. I'll give them a break because of their ages, though I know that's not the only reason why. More interesting though is many students' disturbed reaction to Mares of Thrace, their embrace of the heavy, and their willingness to engage in aestheticized representations of violence on screen - all the while displaying and subverting markers of traditional femininity.

Admittedly, the video is maybe a bit much for the squeamish. As Adrian Begrand notes on Pop Matters, the

"clip quickly shifts to a twisted, torture-porn storyline involving the ladies and an unsuspecting suitor. With MacKichan as the demure girl and Lanz as the evil, corpsepainted voice in her head, our heroines have their way with the fella in ultraviolent fashion, including an incident with garden shears that will make anyone wince."

As Begrand recognizes, the video participates in a visual discourse familiar to any fan of current horror film. There is a common, mass market precedent in contemporary entertainment. But, significantly, his comments read a kind of dark humour in this representation. And even more significantly for my point here is that he also situates the video in relation to the metal genre as a "male-dominated" world.

Because of that male domination in the aggressive music scene, regardless of its causes, any time a woman picks up an axe (metaphorically, or literally - both of which happen in the Mares of Thrace video) she is inevitably (whether she intends to or not) commenting on our cultural assumptions about music and gender, gender and violence. The degree to which the "General Sherman" video unsettled many of the students I played it for suggests that these cultural assumptions are still very deeply entrenched.

EDIT: I should add - a few of the students really appreciated the video, the fact that I played it, and that we were discussing this kind of thing in a university classroom. And even some of the uneasy students were interested in talking about the video and trying to make sense of it.

It was a pleasure to visit the class.

summer of fun = summer of much live music

Still trying to make up for the vast concert-less desert that was the early months of 2010, my summer concert-going is very healthily heading toward mid-August.

This past weekend Hamilton's Gage Park hosted the annual Festival of Friends. I first heard about the fest in the early 90s when my sister lived in Hamilton. I can't remember if she ever took me or not (that is a long time ago, after all), but either way, now I've been myself. It was a short visit – a turn on the ferris wheel, a wander round the vendor stalls, one beer and one live set – but well worth the bus ride there and the FREE admission. The event draws an interesting collection of people (all the way from babies to retirees, I would say) and is pretty successful at drumming up a festive atmosphere.

I would've liked to check out more of the performers over the course of the weekend but decided to concentrate my attention on former Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy. Fresh from a flight over the ocean, Murphy and his band had pockets of black-clad fans dancing and singing along, but seemed to keep even the more 'ordinary' listeners well entertained. I was amused by the minor costume adjustments he managed to maneuver, not to mention his lithe movements around the front of the stage, and especially the bouncing during one song. The 'goth' was kept at a low to moderate level, maybe part of the outdoor environment and mixed crowd, but he did squeeze in an (expected) acoustic version of "Bela Lugosi's Dead."

A mere 24 hours later found me in a very different space, musically and materially. As the fuzzy picture above (poorly) documents, I made it to last night's Boris / Russian Circles show in Toronto. Lee's Palace was a little slow to let us in (giving me time for a couple of samosas) and we had to wait a little more after we got inside. Then Russian Circles came out on the tiny sliver of stage allotted to them, completely ignored the audience and wowed us with their entirely instrumental performance. It was highly amusing to watch a small sea of heads bobbing as the band slipped into a heavy, chunky groove at one point and equally amusing to feel myself responding the same way.

By the time Boris took over the venue was packed at rapidly heating up. I'm not that familiar with the band and ended up hearing a lot more mellow, melodic shoegazer stuff than I expected. Even those hypnotic wandering pieces came across loud and heavy but it was the doomier bits of the set that I liked best, and the final moments brought this side of Boris's sound to a satisfying climax. The drummer provided the most visual entertainment, with his flashy vest and huge gong (you can't see it really, but in this picture he's standing up over his drum kit after delivering his part of the finale).

Next up: Mares of Thrace at Casbah in Hamilton on Thursday, August 12. It's only $5!