[ATTENDED: November 24, 2021] All Hail the Yeti / Suicide Silence
I arrived a little early for this show (for a change–TLA usually has me running late looking for parking). And it took forever the first band to go on. I was sure something was going on.
Then it was announced that Suicide Silence tested positive for COVID and would not be on stage that night. I actually assumed that I’d be going home early, but no, I guess the headliner is scheduled to go on at 9:30 or whatever and that’s what they’re going to do. Which makes sense.
So All Hail the Yeti came out with their cool stage gear and I assume played a longer set than they might normally. Yes, it looks like they played three more songs at our show.
There are four members in the band: Connor Garritty – lead vocals; Nicholas Diltz – bass, backing vocals; Ryan “Junior” Kittlitz – drums and Dave Vanderlinde – guitars. And behind each member (more or less) was a giant banner with a rune on it. Each rune looked more or less like the initials of the band. Which was pretty neat.
Each band member had some kind of Viking paint on. I was in front of guitarist Vanderlinde and the top of his forehead was painted white with a rune painted on top. Lead singer Garrity had his long hair in a pony tail and had on a kind of modified corpse paint to make his eyes really stand out. He sand in a kind of guttural style but was clearly audible. Bassist Diltz had long bleached blond hair an a full beard and sang in a really lovely high voice–an excellent contrast and I actually preferred his vocals.
All of this is leading up to the surprising realization that they are from California and not Scandinavia.
They had some good diversity in their sounds, with some heavy grooves and then some simply heavy sounds. But they also had some fantastic harmonizing like on “After the Great Fire.”
The one song that annoyed me though was “Witch is Dead.” It started out kind of fun with them singing the “ding dong the witch is dead” children’s song but in their heavy style. I thought it was pretty fun, until he had to rhyme it with “the fucking bitch is dead,” and I felt there was a little too much misogyny going on in that line–he seemed to relish it too much.
But if I overlook that I otherwise really enjoyed their set. Their sound was great and their look, while elaborate wasn’t too far over the top to be comical.
- Suicide Woods ¥
- Headless Valley ⊗
- Slow Season ≠
- The Art of Mourning ¥
- Bury Your Memory ⊗
- Witch Is Dead §
- Before the Flames §
- Funeral Heart ⊗
- After the Great Fire ¥
- Mr. Murder §
¥ All Hail the Yeti (2012)
§ Screams from the Black Wilderness (2016)
≠ Highway Crosses (2018)
⊗ Within the Hollow Earth EP (2021)
I didn’t know if there were any opening bands for The Districts, and it turned out there were two.
Alex Silva was up after Patrick McMinn. He took the left side of the stage and was basically right in front of me.
I Just Read About That... 