And now it's time for SFM666's annual Hopscotch Hipster Fest Preview.
Like in 2011 this year's "spit before you leave the stall" Fest in Downtown Raleigh has it's usual suspects when it comes to the band line-up. You have your typical array of bad indie pop / alt. country acts who are all friends or family members of the Independent staff or are simply owed a favor from previous one night stand liaisons that someone does not want made public. You also have the politically correct quota amount of hip hop artists which is as close to a person of color these hipster / indie rock / liberals will get plus they can wear their Obama 2012 shirts if they're worried about getting beat up. Yes people obviously the stiff-est thing at this year's Hopscotch is again the $165 price tag. But supposedly there's Metal, Punk and extreme sounds??? Let's take a look.
One of the headliners this year is THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN. Here is a band that's sucked for so long they make the hoovers at the Independent look like amateurs. Then there's BUILT TO SPILL, a classic 1990's college radio indie rock loser band. They're the nostalgia act of the fest which will bring back memories of those college days for the thirty something crowd of losers. Memories like cramming in the dorms at night, on weekends, alone and I'm not talking about tests either. Call maintenance the door knob is broke again. Also there's YO LA TANGO a typical Cats Cradle act that Hopscotch always seems to have a quota of.
As far as some good stuff there's one of NC's greatest bands on the bill, CORROSION OF CONFORMITY. The hoovers at the Independent need to be congratulated for choosing COC this year, even after 20 years of not even writing about em let alone acknowledging their existence. One must give the staff of the Independent's music dept a break since they've only learned about extreme music recently thanks to trolling websites that ca-tor to hipsters. Let's be honest here, if it wasn't for Pitchfork or Brooklyn Vegan the music staff at the Independent would still be sitting around playing smell my finger while listening to LIMP BISCUIT and saying "dude these guys are way better than MOTORHEAD or SABBATH." As far as other well known local Metal bands on this year's line-up there's, ah I'll get back to you on that one later.
As far as the other bands go there's the drone sounds of SUNN O))) who despite not having released anything new in years and just live on reputation than creativity are definitely worth the smoke machine bath you'll take seeing their performance. Wear interesting shoes because you'll be staring at them most of the time. BARONESS returns to Raleigh for the beard metal hipster fans which is all they have now since their credibility was shot after their Blue album was judged as great a few years ago which fans of real music laughed at. I do recommend seeing PALLBEARER since when their first demo release came out in 2010 only two Doom metal websites and Scumfeast Metal 666 (according to Google search results at that time) had written about them in a review. The word spread and this year they have a full length debut, Sorrow and Extinction, which is not as good. ONEIDA are horrible. NAILS are pretty good metallic post HC. ALTAR OF PLAGUES, from Ireland, had a great full length White Tomb in 2009. In fact I had it in the top black metal albums that year. They were riding that line of black metal / shoegazer. But their last release Mammal from 2011 was mostly shoegazer which the ignorant hipster scribes liked because it had no balls. The only time hipsters like balls is when they're getting teabagged.
On the local front there's BLACK SKIES whose last release sounded like the WHITE STRIPES playing stoner rock. Obviously they're on the bill because their bass player is a show booker and has a reputation (from what I've been told) as being queen of the harpies with her shrill unprofessional rock star attitude. THE ATLAS MOTH are boring and more of a critics band pic. CHEATER SLICKS are an old garage punk band from the late 80s / early 90s who I haven't listened to for a while but pre-dated all of the other blues punk bands that later crawled out of no where. I recommend their Destination Lonely and Whiskey LPs from the early 90's. WITHERED are a progressive blackened death act out of Atlanta. I've seen em twice and still can't hear what makes critics like em. Their last album from 2010, Dualitas, was not that exciting.
There are a few more names I recognize on this year's Independent blowfest but they're all third tier local acts which you could catch on a weekend show in Raleigh. So as far as SFM666 is concerned I recommend COC, NAILS, SUNN O))), CHEATER SLICKS and PALLBEARER out of the all. That shouldn't be a surprise since I hold the music dept of the Independent in such low esteem that toe nail fungus thinks they're peons. Be that as it may at least the downtown business community will do good. They can use the cash. I also know that this preview will make people at the Independent as well as the silly hipsters throw a hissy fit but they would complain for just about anything. The bottom line is that Hopscotch has little to offer to fans of extreme metal. What's really sad is that in a state that has a minimum of a dozen world renown extreme music bands the people at the Independent only know of one to represent at Hobanob fest. That's like having a music fest in Stockholm, Sweden and only having one death metal act on the bill.
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