Heartless at Vacation Vinyl, Friday, December 9th, 2011:
There were actually two performances at Vacation Vinyl the same night! Heartless, a band from Pittsburgh, was following Full of Hell’s performance (the two bands are doing a tour together), and I must admit I couldn’t first differentiate their sound apart: Heartless was as loud, as intense, as angry (although angry is an understatement) as horrific, bestial and aggressive than Full of Hell.
However, if the singer of Full of Hell was a predator who wanted to kill me, Heartless’ frontman was walking in a more destructive way, like a force of nature in pain determined to destroy and crash the universe.
They were hardly stopping between the songs, and their sound was less extreme, with hardly of these doom chords, but raw and more focused into the hardcore theme, and fast, extremely fast at times, as the drummer was hitting his drums to produce a submachine gun sound. Pretty soon, it was a brutal sweaty bath, splashing despair, frustration and vitriol at the audience’s faces, and still exploding a few headbangable metallic riffs during some recovery moments.
Just like the first band members, they were quite young, and although I have no idea what they played, there are a lot of chances the songs were from their last LP, entitled ‘Hell is Other People’. That’s interesting, I am curious what Jean-Paul Sartre would have thought about this genre of music, since it was obviously named after his play ‘No Exit’,.. Anyway, their sound may have been as devastating as ‘Nausea’.
