Blind Idiot God

Internal Bleeding - The Visitant RIP Bill Tolley. You were an awesome dude and an awesome drummer and the void that you've left behind will never be filled. We're all still processing this.

Morbid Angel - Summoning Redemption

So I caught the Boston date of the Decibel Magazine tour and it was lit. Horrendous: Aside from Matt's guitar strap coming undone, they were free of the technical issues that plagued them the last time I saw them and put on a tight, energetic, and fun performance. Midnight: A fist-pumping good time. This was music for beer drinkers and hell-raisers and people were just lapping it up. They're the definition of a "fun" band. Obituary: Band of the night. The Florida rednecks blew the roof off the place with a selection of cuts that mostly revolved around the new album, Slowly We Rot, and Cause of Death, and I'm amazed by how good John Tardy still sounds after all these years. Kreator: Yeah, okay, so some more older material WOULD have been cool (where the hell was Ripping Corpse, Riot of Violence, Blind Faith, or Terror Zone?), but they brought it and also managed to really sell their modern material live (though Gods of Violence is honestly their best since Coma of Souls). They've still got it.

Suffocation - Depths of Depravity

Svart Crown - Carcosa

Defeated Sanity - Hideously Disembodied

Obituary - Infected

Replacire - Enough for One

Havok - Intention to Deceive

Warbringer - Silhouettes

I literally LOLed out loud. Or LLOLOL. (Damn you, Boldikus.) [bOTOX INTENSIFIES]

Immolation - Fostering the Divide

I chose to not go to the Boston date because I didn't want to deal with Nails' fans. I will only ever see them on death metal bills because they attract the worst kind of violent, hyper-macho crowdkilling douchebags on punk bills. I do like them a lot, but like Harms Way, Code Orange, Xibalba, and Young and in the Way (albeit not to quite the same extent with YaitW), they have one of the worst fanbases in music.

Mastodon - Divinations

My last big one was Overkill/Nile. Overkill was tight like always (and their light show caught me by surprise, that thing is WAY more intense than I remember), but Ron Lipnicki's absence was noted and there were a few glaring omissions from their setlist (how tf you not gonna play Wrecking Crew, guys). As for Nile, I was sold on their new lineup. I've never seen them that energetic and engaged and they seemed to be having a ton of fun, and Brad stepping up to the center of the stage and taking over most of Dallas' old vocal parts made a huge difference. Maybe losing Dallas (who, by all accounts, was burned out and having one hell of a midlife crisis) was what needed to happen, because they were never this good with him around.

Okay, so I'm on the "aesthetics are ugly af" side of the spectrum, but the main difference between this and Splashwater Falls is the fact that this will be a fantastic attraction instead of a waste of space that no one likes.

Katatonia - Shifts

Orange Goblin - Red Tide Rising

Overkill - Birth of Tension

Havok - Intention to Deceive

Condemned - Omniscient Perturbations

Necromancing the Stone - Bleed for the Night

Benighted - Reptilian

Those headsets aren't going to survive the beating that the restraints will give them.

Hum - The Pod