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User
Reviews 21
Approval 95%
Soundoffs 74
Album Ratings 501
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Last Active 10-30-22 11:20 pm
Joined 06-28-18
Review Comments 524
| Mosh Pits Today: Still Circular?
My nephew is now wearing Metallica shirts, and he saw Guns and Roses when they came through, I assume at a big arena. I’m trying to get him to go see Possessed-Kreator-Testament when they come through. I told him it’ll be a much better experience in my opinion. | | 1 |  | Possessed
Revelations of Oblivion
OPENER: POSSESSED
QUESTION: Are the pits at these shows circular these days? Or do they just jump up and down and bump into each other still? Moshing changed during the period starting around 1993, when there were both circular pits and hopping “pits,” to 2001, when they all seemed to be hopping “pits.” This kind of moshing was safer and bouncier, but far less fun, and it made me sad to watch circular ones disappear. | | 2 |  | Kreator
Hate Über Alles
NEXT UP: KREATOR (I assume they'll play in the middle)
I know, I know, I should just go with him and see for myself, but I started having to wear glasses in my 20’s, and back in the day the destruction of my glasses at a show like this was practically fucking guaranteed. I may clock the bastard who grabs and smashes them, but I’d still lose my glasses and be unable to drive home. Also – and I cannot emphasize this enough -- I’m just kind of a pussy these days
Besides, even if I was ready for action mentally, I’m old and sick. So, if thrash shows are still like they were circa 1990 I’ll have to pass. But the boy is young and large and tattooed and body builds, so he should be okay as long as he doesn’t look for trouble | | 3 |  | Slayer
Seasons in the Abyss
Back to my question.
The old circular pits were a kick. Terrifying at first, but fucking balls fun. I saw Slayer tour for Abyss and got in the pit VERY briefly. This one was not fun. I was definitely too young and weak -- and not nearly feisty enough -- to be in there, and when I watched a guy catch an elbow in the face and retaliate, and watched the fight explode and blood start to flow, I got the fuck out of there and moved further back and just enjoyed the music.
Holy SHIT did they sound good! | | 4 |  | Slayer
Decade of Aggression
They opened with Raining Blood at this one, but with Hell Awaits on the Clash of the Titans tour later that year
Sadly, I have NEVER been able to recapture the way Mandatory Suicide sounded at that show. It ruined the studio version for me. They just didn’t capture the ferocity of the double-bass thunderstorm in the studio the way I heard it live
I always go to the Decade of Aggression version, recorded on the Abyss tour. It’s not a surprise that Paul Bostaph’s live versions do not sound quite the same, but it fascinates and frustrates me that, even when Lombardo rejoined the band, the Mandatory Suicide live versions STILL aren’t as close to what I remember. It’s frustrating because their newer live recordings are cleaner than Decade’s. | | 5 |  | Ministry
Psalm 69
I had a lot more fun in the pit a couple years later when Ministry toured for Psalm 69. I was older and braver then -- the lines of meth we did in the car before the show helped a lot -- and was able to get in and really cut loose and have one of the best musical experiences I’ve ever had.
There were some ass-kicking thrashers and punks at that show too, but it was definitely a less aggressive crowd overall than the crowds at thrash- and death-metal shows circa 1988. The pit was rough, but not truly dangerous.
It’s like spicy food for me: Jalapenos, man. Jalapenos. You can have that crazy habanero shit | | 6 |  | Front 242
06:21:03:11 Up Evil
And pits were even circular outside of hardcore and thrash. My friend swears he saw MULTIPLE pits break out when Front 242 opened with the first track on this album at a Lalapalooza. I shit you not.
He was as amazed as anyone. I mean, the music is intense and all, but not what you’d associate with slamming.
But moshing is better than any kind of dancing – line, two-step, tango, any of that shit -- and apparently there were many in the crowd who wanted to do some REAL fuck’n dancing. If Front 242 was the best they could get, then so be it | | 7 |  | Nitzer Ebb
Ebbhead
And I believe him 100% because – I swear this is true – I saw a huge circular pit break out, break out of fucking nowhere, at the end of the song Godhead from this album when they toured for it. Fucking thing had to be 300 people strong. Well, 200 anyway. Ok, maybe only 150. But trust me, it was gigantic.
This was NOT the kind of crowd prone to slam dancing. There was some hopping during the show, but nothing remotely rough. Then, when Godhead was over, the pit disappeared as quickly as it began. Craziest shit I’ve ever seen. | | 8 |  | Rammstein
Mutter
But the good old days of circularity appeared to be over when I saw Rammstein tour for Mutter in 2001. The crowd was amped up and ready to move, and there were a couple of us that tried to move in circles, but everyone looked at us funny and just kept hopping up and down and gently bouncing into each other. I thought it was kind of boring. The music and pyrotechnics were of course awesome, but the dancing was only mild salsa. | | 9 |  | Testament
Titans of Creation
MAIN EVENT: TESTAMENT.
Anyway, has anyone been to hardcore or metal or industrial shows lately? Are there likely to be circular pits at this Testament show? Or is the dance form extinct? | |
jrlikestodance
07.02.24 | Saw Kreator open for Mercyful Fate a couple years back and they ripped. Modern hc kids are afraid to circle pit. Hate to see it. Won't have to worry about that w these bands tho. | kildare
07.03.24 | Kreator+Mercyful Fate sounds like a slightly better show, actually. I like everyone on this lineup, but it's A LOT of thrash before Testament even takes the stage. The Mercyful sounds like a good contrast.
"Won't have to worry about that w these bands tho": So, there likely WILL be circle pits at this show? I wanted to tell him I'd go with him, then I pussed out and stopped short. But now I'm sorely tempted to see if my knees will let me dance. I've rarely had more fun in my life. But I should probably think about getting contact lenses first | jrlikestodance
07.03.24 | 100% this will have dope circle pits | kildare
07.03.24 | Fuck'n awesome. The old guys still do it right. Do I still have the balls to show up? At least I have couple a months to wrestle with it.
Thanks jrlikestodance! | chemicalmarriage
07.03.24 | Are you going by yourself? Good idea if you have some buddies with you | kildare
07.03.24 | "good idea if you have some buddies with you": Glad to know some things never change
Yeah, my nephew just saw Guns and Roses, and I was trying to get him to go to a cooler show. He's big and built and heavily tatooed, and looks a little like a bad ass. Don't know if he's ever been in a scrap before though. Worse, he looks like a jock because he is one, a definite mark against us in the old days, so I'll have to think carefully about it. I'm too old and out of practice to put up a real fight, so maybe just show up and hope tickets don't sell out, see how it feels, see what kind of looks we're getting, and puss out and go to a bar instead if need be. I could get him to recruit some buddies, but as his buddies are fellow basketball players that might work against us. But I don't know what things are like now. I haven't been to a show in years | someone
07.03.24 | Imagine what a mosh pit looks like at a Dodecahedron concert. | suppatime
07.03.24 | Idk man, kinda depends on what crowd ends up coming to the show nowadays. Hardcore dancing and its ilk have infected the young and pits are absolute trash nowadays, I rarely go in them.
That being said, I would think this show should have slam dancing and circle pits considering who is playing. Might not be so lucky at other shows though. Also gonna be plenty of people standing around doing nothing considering the age of the bands. | kildare
07.03.24 | @someone: Oh, I'm sure there are pits at Dodecahedron shows but, unless they are actually sacrificing people in the middle of the pits, it's hard to imagine a rougher crowd than what you found in the 1980's heydays of thrash, hardcore and skinhead shows.
Short of an actual riot, of course. The Stones hired Hell's Angels for their security once, and a bunch of guys got hospitalized, and at least one was stabbed to death. That's pretty rough. N.W.A. and other gansta rap shows in the 80's would been wildly intense too, maybe the most dangerous of all, given the crack epidemic and the raging, murderous gang rivalries at the time
So yeah, someone, I think you would be right to anticipate some aggro at a Dodecahedron show (have you seen them?). They sound pretty evil. But I'm not getting the sense that concerts today are anything like what they used to be. We are, after all, in an era where the authorities consider dodge-ball and monkey-bars dangerous | kildare
07.03.24 | @suppatime: "considering the age of the bands": Lol. Yeah, half the crowd will be apt to blowout their knees in the pits, or have already blown them out in the decades since Testament split up the first time. Getting old sucks | Butkuiss
07.04.24 | I’ve seen circle pits but honestly majority of heavy gigs Ive been to lately have featured more crowdkilling than jump moshing, push moshing or circle pits. | kildare
07.04.24 | "featured more crowdkilling": Hmmm...that complicates the picture, doesn't it? It's like society has become less violent in some ways but more violent in others.
I had to read about crowdkilling because it seems to be a newish thing. There were sucker punches getting thrown certainly, but retaliation was 99% certain, so the guy who threw the sucker punch tended to target his own weight class. In that sense it was a little more honorable, more like a hockey game, where everyone in the game was ready for a fight.
But crowdkillers sound like these cowardly, sadistic pieces-of-shit who dress up in armor and gun down helpless schoolchildren.
I'm reminded of a friend I worked with who was from a neighborhood on a fringe of South-Central L.A. This was just a few years after Columbine, and I asked him why he thought these shootings were happening in affluent white schools. He said "look, if I have a problem with you, I have a problem with YOU. Not some random chick just trying to get to class on time." It's like a warrior culture in those neighborhoods, and there's nothing honorable about butchering the peasants. Not that knights didn't occasionally butcher the peasants, but they probably wouldn't have gone online and bragged about it the way these scumbags do today.
It's like, with the enforcement of dodge-ball prohibitions, the overall population has become more pacified. Good for peace, but also good for predators like crowdkillers to take advantage.
Looking at it this way I can't say with total confidence that we've made progress
| zakalwe
07.04.24 | "look, if I have a problem with you, I have a problem with YOU."
Sounds like you have a you problem | kildare
07.04.24 | It looks like I have a problem with prohibitions against monkey-bars?
I do. Today's playground equipment sucks | kildare
07.04.24 | If it's because I look like I'm trying to dis Butkuiss or someone, I don't mean to. I've never seen Dodecahedron live, so I don't know what their shows are like. And Butkuiss added some new information I didn't have.
@Butkuiss: Thanks for responding! If you hadn't I wouldn't know anything about crowdkillers | SitarHero
07.04.24 | My buddy caught a secret Slipknot show in a dive bar, their first with Eloy Casagrande, a couple of months ago. It basically ruined any other concert experience for him. | kildare
07.04.24 | @zakalwe:
And I do have a problem with both crowdkillers and high school shooter pussies.
Almost all mass shooters are young, cis-binary boy-men. (The guy in Las Vegas was a rare outlier). Their problem is that they're hungry for power and willing to use violence to get it, but they never learned how to achieve it properly by manning up in one-on-one contests. Warrior cultures teach young men how to do that, with far more honorable consequences.
(But then warrior cultures are also prone to go bonkers and commit atrocities just like the mass shooters. Medieval knights were famous for their hypocrisy. The difference is that they have a code of honor with how they treat EACH OTHER compared to civilians. This goes for Vikings, Samurais, Siouxs, Janissaries, Bloods, Crips. Any of them. Atrocities happen but are never celebrated, unlike Harris and Klebold worshipers who revel in the killing of innocents like fucking human hyenas).
| kildare
07.04.24 | @SitarHero: "It basically ruined any other concert experience for him". I assume it was awesome? Yeah, I know how that feels. I LOVE little theatre shows. Arena concerts tend to have better production and all, but it's not the even in the same category as the freedom to dance or wander freely
Also, I don't love Slipknot, but I'd love to see them live. Are there pits at Nu-metal shows? Are they still considered nu-metal? I am honestly just curious. | zakalwe
07.04.24 | In the UK the only mass shootings in my living memory are
80s - Hungerford Massacre. Mad bloke.
90s - Dunblane. The absolute worst. Fucked off school caretaker, old mad bloke.
2010s - Derek Bird, Lake District. Snapped old bloke.
The US is absolutely mental. | kildare
07.04.24 | Interesting. Thanks for the data zakalwe. Yeah, it's not just young kids. There's a bunch of old guys that do it too.
Do you know of any cis-binary women? (I qualify "woman" because I know of at least one case where the killer identified as a woman, but was chromosomally XY, which complicates arguments).
Anyway, it's the fucking guns. I know, I know. I was actually raised in a gun culture, which kind of evolved from crazed, land-hungry pioneers essentially stealing property from Native American warrior cultures. It was a recipe for atrocities all around. That's why I think of the atrocity bit, because as horrible and bloodthirsty as pioneers could be, they had a strong moral sense of how to treat EACH OTHER, internally, as peers. (And the native groups felt the same way towards their own peers), so I'm seriously contemptuous of the murderous bastards, of any age or gender.
Mostly it's because they are just animals -- whoops! There goes the dehumanization! -- but a little of it is selfish on my part: Their crimes are understandably leading to tighter gun laws. School shooters (almost!) never come from families where guns are part of the culture, and gun laws are a serious threat to my worldview.
But, fuck man, we've got to them out of their hands somehow. I taught remedial math in a school where the guards carried openly, but Christ it's unnerving. Guards can't react until AFTER the shooting starts; by then I could've already taken a bullet. There's no way the U.S. can keep going like this. It saddens me, but tighter gun laws are the only way to change it. Can't guarantee future society will be the better for it, but it's going to have to go that way | kildare
07.04.24 | @zakalwe: gotta go. If you comment and I don't respond later shoot me a text and I'll check it | SitarHero
07.05.24 | "Are there pits at Nu-metal shows?"
I play in an SOAD tribute band that's doing pretty well, and my buddy plays in a Slipknot tribute that's doing insanely well. There are always pits. We even get occasional stage-divers and crowdsurfers...and this is for tribute acts. So you can imagine how cray it gets for the real thing. | normaloctagon
07.05.24 | Been going to death metal shows pretty regularly for the last 15 years, circle pits are still a thing, never really seen this change
I do think that generally speaking modern metal crowds are more interested in hearing the music than moving super frenetically to it. Which honestly is part of why I like the scene and why I never got super into the hardcore scene. If i want to really get down and let loose I’m going to see some techno | VlacDrac
07.05.24 | Based Octa. | kildare
07.05.24 | @SitarHero: "We even get occasional stage-divers and crowdsurfers...and this is for tribute acts"
@normaloctagon: "circle pits are still a thing, never really seen this change"
This thread has been cool and I appreciate all the comments from everyone. It's fascinating what a mixed picture I'm getting at the aggression levels at today's shows. I still hazard that things have chilled overall, on average, but apparently it depends on what shows you go to and, I would guess, what city you're in. Like, it just depends on how many personalities in a crowd love aggro and how many just "want to hear the music." I'm glad there's still an outlet for (mostly) guys that want to get really rough with like-minded pugilists. Ironically I think it helps some people maintain civility back the real world. | kildare
07.05.24 | @normaloctagon: A lot of committed metal lovers – is the term “metalhead” an epithet on this site, or is it accepted? – scoff at the idea of frenzied dancing to electronic music, but I agree that techno, electron-industrial, EBM, aggrotech (and I certainly missed a bunch of others) offer INCREDIBLY energetic music
Three to five wildly dance-able techno tracks to recommend? | kildare
07.05.24 | @SitarHero: Best three to five SOAD tracks to recommend?
You're obviously a fan so I know it's painful to limit to ONLY three, but I'm not really a fan so low doses are better. Really I just need just one killer track to hook me and I'll give them more time, but otherwise if I two or three in a row and I'm still not hooked I just end up passing them over | jrlikestodance
07.05.24 | Love hc dancing and love dancing to techno < 3 | jrlikestodance
07.05.24 | My techno recs: Two Lone Swordsmen - Glide by Shooting, Drexciya - Surface Terrestrial Colonization, Cybotron - Clear. Lean more towards electro but these are some of my all time fav tracks | kildare
07.05.24 | Thanks jrlikestodance! I should have a killer playlist by day's end. I love EBM and stuff like it but, except for early Lords of Acid, techno has just been too vast to plunge into. It's good to have just a few tracks to get used to. | SitarHero
07.05.24 | Chop Suey, BYOB, War
There are others that might be more popular, but IMO those 3 tracks are unimpeachable. | kildare
07.06.24 | Sweet, I'll load 'em up. Thanks SitarHero!
I would bet that you've seen this video, but as a SOAD cover artist I wanted to make sure you were aware of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi106DZJhuQ
It's not better than their own music or anything, but I still love it | SitarHero
07.06.24 | Haha yeah that was hilarious, and very well done! I'm also ethnically Indian, as my name suggests, so for a little while ALL my musician friends were sending that to me lol. | kildare
07.06.24 | Excellent. I would not have bet $1000 that you'd seen it, but probably $100. But it's so priceless it would have been one of those "oh man, you HAVE to see this!" moments, so I couldn't resist.
I think it's so cool how their melodies are so complicated and microtonal, but they can still harmonize over western guitar chords. Since Indian scales have so many more tones, I would not think that their melodies and the guitar would be able to match up, but I guess they're close enough if the guitar is tuned in right the key? Or is the guitar so distorted that you can't hear that they're not truly in tune with each other? Like, it wouldn't work with an acoustic guitar?
Don't feel obligated to answer that! You'll have to cut me off at some point, otherwise I'll talk forever, man. I've just been interested in non-western music for a long time, but especially the stretch from around Morocco, then east through Palestine/Israel and Iran to India. | SitarHero
07.06.24 | Interestingly enough, based on my limited knowledge of Indian classical music, while there are 22 microtones that get used, most of it uses the normal 12 semitones, similar to Western music. The major scale (do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti) has an identical Indian version (sa-re-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni).
Punjabi and North Indian folk music, which those women are singing, is also influenced by Persian and Arabic music, as I'm sure Armenian music is too which is why there are enough similarities for it to sound like an SOAD song. | kildare
07.06.24 | "The major scale (do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti) has an identical Indian version (sa-re-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni)":
Freak'n PERFECT man. This is exactly what I was asking, but I didn't want to throw a bunch of technical jargon out in case you weren't familiar it.
I've had this cool book called Musical Acoustics for decades. It's ludicrously technical, but it runs through sound waves and tuning systems in all kinds of different instruments, and ends with instructions on how to build basic instruments like recorders and clavichords. It used to be on my bucket list, but as I get older it gets further down the list, and I'll probably never get through it. So I have to make due with little tidbits like yours.
Thanks SitarHero. Good luck moving the band forward! |
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