It’s a quiet Saturday night heavy with cold, and the suburban Connecticut landscape is crusted over with half a foot of frozen snow. Pellets of freezing rain hit the ice and glaze over the windshields of cars with the sound of static on a radio. On Foss Hill, a few lone sledders careen into the darkness, the scraping of their sleds swallowed into the night. Despite the mess of slush there is something clean and lonely about the night, like a supermarket after closing time.
Inside the WestCo Café, though, it smells like a war zone —oil and smoke fumes fill the dimly lit basement. In the corner, a boy nurses his bloody nose, while a sweaty and enthusiastic crowd chants: “Doom! Doom! Doom! Doom!” At the center of the circle, five figures, three of whom are wearing capes, deliberate inaudibly. Behind them, a series of projected images flash across a draped screen, while a deep fryer bubbles precariously close to the sound equipment. The whole thing feels like a weird twist on “Macbeth,” complete with sorcerers, cauldrons, and ominous lighting. Within moments, the figures, who are not, disappointingly, sorcerers, but the members of a band called Kentucky Fried Doom, launch into movement, saturating the room with dense, crushing waves of sound.
This was the scene of the aptly named: “Heavy Rocks!!” show, a night devoted to doom metal, punk, and deep-fried potatoes. The show kicked off with the Fusty Nuts, a University band featuring Keenan Mitchell ’09 on drums, Sam Ottinger ’08 on guitar and vocals, and Luke Woollard ’09 on bass. The Fusty Nuts got the evening off to an energetic start, setting the tone with their precisely rendered brand of dirty, destructive rock. The short set veered mostly between galloping metal riffs and seventies-era guitar solos (complete with squealing high notes and swinging mops of hair). Although they classify themselves as: “Punk/Ska/Crunk,” the Fusty Nuts paid their proper respects to the theme of the evening with a heavy guitar sound that rolled over the crowd like a wailing marriage between Black Sabbath and Soundgarden. True to the Myspace description above, the Fusty Nuts eased off the heavy with fast punk breakdowns and slow growling vocals.
Next up was Red vs. Black, a rollicking punk trio that hails from Ithaca, N.Y., with Sam Tallent on drums, Clay Dehaan on bass, and Willie Oscheweiler on vocals. With this lean but powerful lineup, RvB tore through their forty-five minute set, whipping the crowd into a frenzy of slam-dancing which ended, coincidentally or not, soon after the aforementioned bloody nose. This raucously good set featured a fast-as-hell sound that was ecstatically reminiscent of ’80s hardcore bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag. RvB’s vocalist swaggered with a little more irreverence than we might have imagined from a young Ian Mackaye (of Fugazi fame), but the band still managed to channel the D.C. hardcore lineage in an organic and creative way. This was evidenced in RvB’s more forgiving songs, whose softer edges touched on post-hardcore reference points like Fugazi and Slint. RvB finished off with two Misfits covers (“because everybody loves the Misfits!”): “Skulls” and “Hybrid Moments.”
From here on out, it was all Doom. Time slowed and gravity seemed to increase as Bright, a three-person doom-metal band from Higganham, Conn., sucked WestCo into a pit of (as the show description correctly predicted) “crushing doom-sludge.” Bright proved to be epically loud and epically heavy, as many of us discovered later while trying to shake the telltale ringing from our ears. Bright matched Red vs. Black in intensity, channeling the crowd’s slam-dancing energy into heroic feats of headbanging. This, of course, set the stage for the evening’s main course, as it were: Kentucky Fried Doom.
Although KFD’s official lineup includes eight members, the six present on Saturday were Will Blomquist ’08 on bass, Max Lavine ’10 on drums, Destin Douglas ’09 and Max Gardner ’10 on guitar, Mary Longley ’10 on synth, and Dana Matthiessen ’09 on fryer — that’s right, fryer. This is where we return to the mystical scene of smoke, wizardry, and canola oil. As Longley would later explain, KFD is “doom-metal plus.” Plus what? “Plus eleven flavors and spices,” she answered. The “flavor” she was referencing is provided by a homemade contact mic, which is shoved into a piece of food (available on Saturday were tofu dogs and potatoes) and tossed into a deep fryer. The sound of frying is then manipulated by four or five distortion pedals (operated by one Matthiessen), and then filtered through speakers. The question is, can a fryer really act as an instrument?
“Different foods make different sounds,” Longley explained. “Maybe.”
She deferred to Lavine.
“It’s about faith,” he agreed.
This was good enough for the WestCo crowd, which seemed energized by the combination of doom and French fries. KFD’s appeal was not merely limited to novelty, however; thanks, in part, to its many members, KFD delivered a sound that was densely layered and even nuanced, rather than simply grinding. On Saturday, this experimental take on metal was elevated to almost psychedelic proportions, as their musical performance merged with ghostly film projections and repeated, almost tribal demands for more doom.
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