I bought tickets to see Torche at Saint Vitus before I realized that the show was on the same night as the Nevada presidential debate, which like all parts of the nomination process I've been following closely. As much as I was looking forward to seeing Michael Bloomberg get eviscerated -- something I predicted before the debate (just ask my cats) -- I wasn't about to skip the show. I discovered Torche a few months ago by way of a tour preview on BrooklynVegan; I won't pretend to know anything about the contemporary metal scene (except that there are a lot of sub-genres, and that one of my favorite bands from last year was a metal-adjacent Belgian band called Bruno), but the Torche song featured on the post -- 'Admission' -- was intriguing to me: it sounded like some of my favorite post-hardcore bands of the 1980s (Hüsker Dü) with a tremolo-bar shoe-gaze sheen by way of My Bloody Valentine. The rest of the album was more recognizably metal, although I would say it's more dirge-like with metal 'references' -- certain chord progressions, drum fills, the inflection of the singer's voice, and so on -- than what I would typically associate with 'metal.' If you Google the band, their genres are listed as 'sludge metal' and 'stoner rock,' which paints a basic but not-completely-inaccurate picture, as labels tend to do. Another reason I was intrigued: when I saw the band photo, my gaydar went off, and it only took two clicks to learn that the singer/guitarist Steve Brooks is, in fact, gay. (Sometimes gaydar works.) I soon had tickets to see them. As someone who sometimes feels like an empty circle in the Venn Diagram of Contemporary Gay Culture, I wanted to know more about what was happening in the gay corners of sludge metal.
After taking the 2 to the L to the G and walking ten blocks north on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, I found the club, which thanks to its lack of signage and windows also had interesting parallels with a kind of gay bar slash sex dungeon that (to my knowledge) has mostly gone the way of the dinosaur. I felt a little nervous about going in, which I'm sure was just a residual reaction to the dread and longing I used to feel contemplating the idea of going into a gay bar.
Inside felt more familiar. I had spent thousands of hours in similar venues all over the continent and abroad. The club comprised two rooms; in one, a long bar, in the other, a small (but perfect) performance space, maybe big enough for 250 people or so. The bathroom, heavily stickered and decrepit, reminded me of hundreds of others I had seen (and used) back in the day, with the worst BY FAR being the one in the basement of CBGB. (If there's a museum somewhere dedicated to CBGB, I hope they reconstructed the bathroom, because there was nothing else like it.) Back at the bar, I spent time analyzing the crowd: no surprise, it was mostly male and mostly white (in probably Iowa/New Hampshire/Park Slope percentages if I had to guess). (I didn't see any MAGA gear, however.) Most were 25-45 and many were appealingly sturdy in build. There was a certain look -- beard, leather/flannel, maybe a pocket chain -- that made it sometimes difficult to say whether the guy in question was 1) a metal fan, 2) a gay leather bear, or 3) both. According to an interview I read with Steve Brooks, the band doesn't have a large gay following; he lamented that Torche has never been asked to march in a Pride event and that he once received a fan letter telling him to enjoy the 'hot chicks' in Sweden. (File under: the dispiriting fan letters of straight men.) Having some experience in gay crowd assessment, I can say with confidence that there were some fellow gays at the show; like always, how many was a question, but there were some, which is always better than none.
The band was amazing. They opened by playing the first four or five songs from their latest record -- the one I'd been listening to -- which for a few minutes made me feel young. It's hard to describe how loud it was; every kick of the bass drum and every bass note felt like a hammer ripping through my chest as a Category 5 hurricane of guitars lashed down from above. (I had thick gobs of wax in my ears.) A mosh pit formed and dissolved and formed again, like tide pools. I stayed on the fringes, admiring a pair of tall women who were in the thick of it. It was a polite mosh pit; someone's glasses were knocked off and people stopped so that he could pick them up. Mostly I felt blanketed by the wall of sound. It was headbanger music. I loved it.
There's something very purifying about being immersed in music that for building blocks uses a kind of primeval anger and impulse for violence -- music that, to appreciate it, demands that you literally 'bang your head' -- to construct something towering and beautiful. After the show, as I thought about the debates I had missed and the underlying political process of our times, I realized (not for the first time) that one of the reasons I support Bernie (first) and Elizabeth (second) far more than any other candidate is because they also give voice to a kind of deep, fundamental anger with the hope to transform it into something good, something helpful, something that will benefit more than it will harm. When people claim that Bernie supporters are 'too angry' or that Elizabeth is 'too strident' (or whatever they said after the debate), it always seems to me that these critics -- let's call them 'moderates' -- are positioned in a place where 'change' might seem desirable in an abstract but incremental way, but they don't know what it's like to be erased or marginalized or otherwise oppressed by a class of corporate management drones like Michael Bloomberg (never mind Donald Trump).
We live in angry times. There are countless good reasons to be angry. It seems pointless to deny it and better to recognize it, to harness it before it leads to actual (as opposed to symbolic) violence. (Or more violence than we already have.)
In the same way anger has a place in art, it has a place in politics.
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