Prizehog at Vacation Vinyl on Friday October 14th, 2011
As soon as they started, the vibrating sound was intense and powerful, slowly unfolding the terrible drama to come. Watching Prizehog playing a free in-store at Vacation Vinyl on Friday night after a long day, was like waking up into a new dimension, doom and doomer at every second.
I don’t know how many bands producing this sort of noise-metal sound use a keyboard/organ, I guess not too many and that may explain why Prizehog’s sound was specially tenebrous and murky. The three long songs they played all had this slow, dark, almost melancholic beginning, installing little by little distortion and loudness, then breaking and tearing the place.
The sparse and undecipherable vocals, buried in the noise, sounded like something between the scream of a dying beast and a choir from hell, and the long development, a noise ascending assault, was giving the impression we will never be touching the bottom of the well from inferno we were falling into.
The San Francisco trio has recently released their first full-length LP ‘Thought Nest’ and each song they played was sprawling this epic, almost symphonic, distortion, like a sort of sonic tormented old-Hollywood-big-production-peplum.
There was some continuity from one song to another, and at the same time it was a different adventure each time, dense and layered, chaotic and grandiose. Long haired Rion, Zakk and Veronica were growing a scary and even angry sound, the guitar and the keyboard (played by the girl) bringing the moody part, the slow and low drumbeats contributing a lot to the doom atmosphere.
‘You guys are insane!’ shouted someone at the end of the show, visibly happy with what he'd heard,… yeah that was the feeling.
