My First NW Terror Fest

I moved to Seattle for the music. But for all its musical history, Seattle has always been a little weak in the heavy metal department. So it was an understatement to say that I was stoked with a new heavy metal festival started up in Seattle presented by No Clean Singing, the blog that has introduced me to most of the metal I’ve discovered in the last five or so years. But times being what they are, life got in the way and I missed the inaugural fest. It happened again the second year. But this year I finally managed to make it to one night at one of the venues. So here is my take on Northwest Terror Fest.

NWTF 101

Northwest Terror Fest is a 3-day extreme metal festival in Seattle. More or less. There are some peripheral sets that extend the duration a bit, and there are always a couple bands on the line up that don’t fit the “extreme” label. They combine some pretty big names like Pig Destroyer and Inter Arma with a bunch of Northwest bands that may be less familiar (even to locals, since there aren’t so many Seattle venues booking metal).

So far, it has always been the last weekend of May at the joint Neumo’s/Barboza venue with a stage in each. You can buy a full festival pass or tickets for individual days/stages. The prices are remarkably cheap, especially for the full festival pass. One of these days, I’ll manage to clear the whole weekend and take advantage of the savings.

What I Saw

This year I was only able to attend on Saturday night, and with funds tight, I only bought tickets to the Barboza Stage. That means I got to see five bands: Shrine of the Serpent, Immortal Bird, Eight Bells, Gadget, and Khorada. As is often the case, I was most excited about the bands earlier in the evening.

Shrine of the Serpent

Shrine of the Serpent out of Portland are crushingly heavy doom. As I wrote last week, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything this heavy capable of maintaining a melody before, which makes Shrine of the Serpent a festival highlight for me. I’ll be listening to them a lot in the weeks to come.

Immortal Bird

Immortal Bird was a grab bag of goodies that take it to eleven. Their tags on Bandcamp include black, death, grindcore, thrash, prog, and sludge, and they are all accurate. The amalgamation isn’t quite cohesive, but it is hella fun. Fronting the band with great stage presence, Rae Amity’s gnarly snarls really transformed it from a set to a show.

Eight Bells

Eight Bells certainly have their extreme moments, but they exist more to punctuate the otherworldly, post-black Portlandness of their spooky, atmospheric ballads. These are the witchy women the Eagles sang about. Anyone who has ever sat in a basement smoking pot, playing D&D, and listening Black Sabbath needs this band. If you think that sounds dismissive, please remember that Conan the Barbarian was my favorite movie when I was twelve. You can’t listen to this music without visions of swordsmen and sorcerers dancing in your head. After the intensity of Immortal Bird, this set was almost a palate cleanser. In daily life, Eight Bells is absolutely my jam.

Gadget

After Eight Bells, we left Barboza to grab tacos down the street. We got back just as Gadget was starting their set, but the crowd had filled in, and we didn’t feel like fighting to get up front. So I enjoyed the madness of Gadget from a comfy seat in the back with a girly drink. These Swedes had a similar approach to Immortal Bird, but where Immortal Bird sometimes stepped back, putting some variety into the dynamics, Gadget turned it up to eleven and broke the knob off.

Khôrada

Khôrada seemed like a bit of an odd closer for a set of mostly extreme bands. But Khôrada comprises Agalloch members Don Anderson (guitar), Jason Walton (bass) and Aesop Dekker (drums) and Giant Squid guitarist/vocalist Aaron John Gregory. With a pedigree like that, I would have scheduled them to headline, too. Plus, there was a doomy cast to the overall lineup (and for passholders, it was the pause before the storm of Pig Destroyer headlining the upstairs venue) that fit with Khôrada’s gothy melancholy. That dark but not particularly heavy music doesn’t always do it for me, but there are times when it’s all I want to hear.

Unfortunately, Khôrada was having a little bit of trouble with the sound, and we couldn’t hear the vocals for much of the set. Compared to how tight and clear the rest of the sets sounded, it was a little bit of an anti-climactic close to a really great line up. I kind of got the impression that they haven’t quite gelled as a unit yet. I’ll be keeping an eye on them in the future, though. With such high caliber musicians in the group, in a few years I will probably be bragging about having seen them when.

Clockwork and Butter

Neumo’s and Barboza are two of my favorite Seattle venues, even in earlier incarnations. Neumo’s has hosted some of my favorite shows of all time. Barboza is a classic Seattle shoebox, but in a basement. That should make it awful, but somehow it manages a classy, almost speakeasy vibe and always has good sound. The two stages are in the same building, and the NWTF set times are staggered so that passholders never need to choose between shows.

The Barboza lineup started at 5 pm and was done by 10:10, and yes, the set times were that precise. Smooth as butter and regular as clockwork, you’d never know NWTF was run by mostly people new to festival programming. Maybe getting home before 11 isn’t very metal, but personally, I loved being able to see five bands and still get a full night’s sleep.

Quality Humans

For years, I’ve had a fancy set of expensive ear plugs that I keep in my purse at all times. But a while back the drawstring on their little pouch broke, and sometime this winter, one of the ear plugs was lost. We also keep a box of the cheap disposable kind in a cabinet by the door. But I forgot that I emptied the box last year at Pickathon (so many families don’t realize kids need ear protection for amplified music regardless of genre). Which is a long way of saying that for the first time in years, I went to a concert without ear plugs. Late in the evening, a man standing near me tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Do you need ear plugs?” and just handed me a pair. It was a small act of kindness that exemplifies the generally friendlier vibe of NWTF.

Quality Fest

They’ll talk about it when asked, but marketing materials for NWTF never mention feminism. It is a feminist festival, though. Three of the five bands I saw included women (one was female majority). That is a higher proportion of female artists than any other festival I’ve ever attended. I’ve been to festivals that didn’t have any female artists. So I know that the organizers had to work really hard to bring that kind of equality to their stage, and it’s even cooler that that they don’t pat themselves on the back for it. They’re just quality humans doing what everyone should be doing – booking the best bands they can get, which includes making the effort to reach good bands that get overlooked due to structural inequality in the industry.  

One thing they do promote is their anti-harassment policy, posting it on social media and all over the venue. The first time I saw that was as Eistnaflug, the Icelandic metal festival that feels like a family reunion (if you liked your whole family) and I thought it was brilliant. I’m glad to see it’s catching on. I think I’m not the only one, either, as the demographic mix of the audience was a lot more varied than you usually see at a metal show.

{Aside: I don’t mean that the festival drew a bunch of non-metalheads, either. I mean, it’s still a line up of extreme metal bands and you’d have to be buried pretty deep to believe that there even is such a thing as “posers” who pretend to like metal. Heavy metal is still not cool in the mainstream world no matter how many Kardashians wear Slayer shirts on Instagram.}

My Kind of Fest

Pairing the anti-harassment policy with NWTF’s generally loose approach to rules (sure, bring a camera, stage-dive, whatever you want) gave the entire event a very grown-up vibe. You know, fine, if you’re a 21-year-old white dude who knows how to behave, come on in. But for once, here’s a festival for grown-ups who don’t have time for bullshit that distracts from the music, and like the music they like. That music just happens to sound like jackhammers and broken glass. And it is sweet to my ears.