The three guys from METZ were bathing in bright light at the Troubadour, a complete change from their show at the Echo last November, where they played in almost complete darkness, meaning I didn’t even see what they looked like! A total loss for me and the audience because they are three good looking guys playing their instruments with a visible rage and the veins of their necks ready to explode.
Alex Edkins on guitar and main vocals, Hayden Menzies on drums and Chris Slorach on bass came on stage and right away played ‘Dirty Shirt’, and their huge sound, eardrum-bleeding-skull-crashing-tinnitus-giving sound, never left the room during their entire set, making me realize that no recording could ever give justice to this humongous and ferocious beast. They sure had an impressive sound, there is no other way to put it, and whatever influences you may hear behind ‘Sad Pricks’, or ‘Rats’ or ‘Wet Blanket’ – 90s grunge? Nirvana? The Melvins? Fugazi? Big Black? Noise rock? Post hardcore? Post krautrock on steroids? – this prodigious noise hijacked my entire brain, smashed it into pieces, brought them back together and repeatedly hammered my skull until, totally overwhelmed, I wanted to scream my lungs out! Said like this, it could sound like torture but curiously it was not only painless but also totally empowering. The fact that I woke up with a pounding migraine has certainly nothing to do with the show (it just happens sometimes), but there was this pulsing-throbbing idea behind their pulverizing music, perfectly reflected by the songs’ titles, like ‘Headache’, ‘Nausea’, ‘Wasted’. However, the hearing loss I suffered when exiting the Troubadour had certainly everything to do with the show,… I know that earplugs exist, but at this decibel level, it would not have made any difference and I would have needed earplugs of the size of the room.
It seems that the west-side Troubadour crowd was more ‘civilized’ than the east-side crowd I usually blend in, at the Echo, the Echoplex or the Bootleg. Sure they started moshing but METZ was already playing their fourth song, the muscular-vengeful-aggressive ‘Get Off’, and even then, it was a respecting moshing: I would have never been able to stay in the front at the Echo! And, better, I didn’t see any body flying in the air, people were really sage considering what I have witnessed otherwise.
Nevertheless, every song was played in the urgency with a relentless drive, a visceral attitude, and Alex Edkins’ shouted vocals, bringing fury, rawness and terror. Actually, without underestimating his two bandmates' roles at all, he was the one commanding the show, drenched in sweat after just a few songs, howling his despair as if it was his last resort,… I mean all this sounded quite dark and always at the edge of crashing somewhere in the middle of the stage,… I am still wondering, were they in control or totally possessed by some rock demons?
METZ certainly played all the songs they have written, the ten ones featured on their debut self-title album, plus ‘Dirty Shirt’, released separately, and since the crowd was insisting for them to come back, they did an encore with a new one, and it appeared as mind-crushing as the other ones. I read somewhere that they said their music ‘sounds like it's on the verge of falling apart’, and it exactly describes the wonder-how-I-survived-this odd feeling still in my mind after METZ' s thunderous show.
