Flash back to last year’s Bug Jar festival: It’s a
picture-perfect summer day on the lawn near the Highland Park bowl. Between
acts, audience members toss Frisbees, hacky sack, drink beer, and mingle. As
local trio Sulaco sets up, guitarist-vocalist Erik Burke, sounding barely
awake, says: “We are the heavy metal portion of this event. Hopefully, we won’t
scare the hell out of too many of you.”
Suddenly, a harsh, hyperkinetic flurry of sound erupts from
the stage. Burke’s voice becomes an agonized, demonic howl, and the frantic,
menacing roar behind him threatens to consume the entire scene. Strangely
enough, hardly anybody even flinches, and two people in particular seem to dig
the music. First, a middle-aged man in jogging shorts, suntan lotion, and not
much else stands before the stage and performs dance moves that fall somewhere
between aerobics and Qui Gong. All four of his limbs move in time with Sulaco’s
mind-numbingly complex rhythms.
The second is — no lie — a toddler. With gleeful abandon, she waves her arms in the air and makes
monstrous faces at the people around her. Watching the band rock so furiously
in the distance while this child keeps pace feels completely unreal.
Children’s music notwithstanding, Sulaco (the name of the
spaceship in Aliens, by the way) is a
local ambassador of the international underground vanguard that’s pushing metal
in all new directions — our very own glimpse into metal’s future. This won’t
surprise anyone familiar with the band’s collective resume, which includes time
served in Within, Mungbeandemon, Kalibas, and, of course, local tech-metal
legends Lethargy (which also included Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher, both now
members of critically-acclaimed Atlanta thrash-prog hybrid Mastodon, which
plays Water Street August 4).
Contemplating the meaning of heaviness over a few rounds at
Monty’s Krown, though, the band members downplay their role in the music’s
evolution. Bassist Lon Hackett, drummer Chris Golding, and Burke have always
kept their ears to the ground for obscure bands, many of whom they hold in high
esteem for making important contributions of their own. Hackett even half-jokes
that all potential innovation in metal has already happened, and the whole band
is reluctant to forecast where the music might be headed next.
As for their own stuff, they’re excited because the
possibilities seem wide open.
“There will probably be a little bit of everything,” Burke
predicts. “We’re still kind of molding [our sound].”
Maybe so, but in concert Sulaco is unfalteringly tight.
Remembering these songs, even as a listener, takes intense effort. Playing them
requires staggering technical skill.
For the uninitiated,
it’s difficult to pick a point along metal’s timeline that puts Sulaco’s work
in perspective. But here’s an oversimplification: Almost as soon as bands like
Metallica and Slayer created thrash metal by upping the ante on Motörhead’s
already fast tempos, a new crop of artists, e.g. Death and Obituary, set out to
outdo thrash in both speed and heaviness and death metal was, ahem, born.
Around 1988, death metal, in turn, begat what is called grindcore, whose
pioneers, Napalm Death and Carcass, played superhumanly fast bursts of
near-indecipherable noise that rushed by the ear like a blur of static. With
each of these developments, it seemed like music couldn’t possibly get any
heavier or faster.
Since then, of course, it has. Several times. Like the
explorer Magellan, who was hell-bent on finding the end of the world (even if
it meant falling off) metal bands have been in a perpetual race to the end of
the spectrum only to plunge from there headfirst into the unknown. By the time
avant-garde composer John Zorn declared that grindcore reminded him of ’60s
free jazz, avant-garde sensibilities had crept into the music. Sulaco and their
“extreme metal” peers — the Dillinger Escape Plan, Burnt By The Sun, Today Is
The Day, Meshuggah, Candiria, etc. — are nothing if not experimental.
Sulaco’s music plays like audio invisible ink — by the
time your mind has grasped one idea, it’s too late because the band is already
somewhere else, and the listener constantly loses a sense of footing. Sulaco
makes disorientation palatable, though, thanks in no small part to Golding, who
matches extreme speed with extreme finesse and profound compositional sense,
deftly smoothing out the angular rhythmic edges and giving the music true flow.
(For my money, his playing already rivals the greats of the genre.)
“You can’t just be a line of riffs,” says Hackett. “You can do that, but you need something to
come back to that forms a hook in your head.”
Eastman professor Ciro Scotto traces Sulaco’s “highly
segmented” approach to Stravinsky. Metalheads, he offers, even if unaware of
modern classical, may unconsciously receive inspiration from film soundtracks.
When it’s suggested to them that Sulaco might appeal to
non-metalheads (specifically classical musicians), Burke, Golding, and Hackett
pause and mull it over. They seem to think this is possible, “If,” muses
Hackett, “they’re open-minded enough to look past the distortion and the
vocals.”
“Yeah,” Burke answers, laughing, “the vocals make most
people cringe right away.”
Sulaco plays on
Thursday, July 29, with Ken Mode and
American Heritage at Monty’s Krown,
875 Monroe Avenue, at 8 p.m. $6. 271-7050.
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 3, 2004.
