Pit Lord (photo by Benjamin Kraklow of Light & Shadow QC)
For two million years, man has been cooking his food. That distant ancestor, homo erectus, harnessed the fearsome power of fire to unlock the hidden nutrients of the fruits of the land, feeding and nourishing his developing brain and unwittingly paving the way for human evolution. Turning his prominent brow to the African landscape, he ate what he could harvest, which soon included his fellow living creatures.
That the human brain as we know it should evolve from the slaughter and consumption of the other animals set to roam the unsympathetic earth is a testament to the foulness of existence itself. So, too, are the works wrought by that brain. In his need to maintain his increasingly sophisticated existence, man began to produce tools. In his emerging need for self-expression, he began to scrawl on the walls of caves. And over time, he would create tools for increasingly sophisticated means of self-expression: the drum, the guitar, the flute.
By the mid-20th century, the industrial society that supplied the tools for the unprecedented destruction of the Second World War had begun producing new goods for peacetime. In the equally unprecedented prosperity enjoyed by the war's greatest victors, the baby superpower known as the United States of America, undreamt-of luxuries such as the automobile and the television set became commonplace. As the factories turned to production of the spoils of peace, mass production of musical instruments coincided with the emergence of the curious new music known as rock and roll. The primary instrument of this polyglot fusion of African rhythm with string music descended from the British Isles was the electric guitar, itself the product of various Eurasian and African traditions. It emerged as a uniquely American accessory, finding its way into the hands of a generation enjoying unprecedented leisure time.
In the decades to come, rock and roll was mutated by the very industrial society that allowed it to flourish. Heavy metal, born of the clang and throb of heavy industry in British and American cities including Birmingham and Detroit, took the primal sexual thrust of rock and roll in a darker direction, influenced by the grim realities of working-class life and the misery wrought on the world by the very industry that provided its high standard of living. By the late 1980s, the blues roots of the first metal bands were all but abandoned in favor of lightning-fast tempos, artillery-like sonic barrages, and the demented shrieks and guttural howls of a new and extreme form of self-expression.
Death metal has roots in numerous bands and places, most significantly in the humid, blood-soaked, stimulant-crazed state of Florida, a peninsula cursed since the days of the Spaniards, if not before. Its tentacles have spread across the globe, including to the poisoned wastes of Iowa, which brings us to the subject of this article.
The city of Davenport sits at the edge of an angry river, a vast brown serpent coated with the chemical and spiritual residue of a crude and blundering empire. The land on which it sits was conned from under the feet of the benighted natives in a double-cross common to the days of westward expansion. Its water is befouled by years of industrial pollution, its governmental affairs gummed by the corruption and incompetence of entrenched bunglers indifferent to the life and well-being of its citizens. As this piece is written, its downtown is infested with masked thugs bent on snatching brown-skinned people off the street and tossing them into vans, to be brutalized by the amok system of the powers that first seized that land nearly 200 years ago. And from its hills comes the pre-apocalyptic death metal juggernaut known as Pit Lord.
Pit Lord's music is a product of this technocratic age. The drums that are the living pulse of rock-derived music have been replaced with electronic drum samples, lending to their music a martial precision that compliments the sternness of their riffs. They came of age in an era where the cooking of meat, so crucial to survival, has evolved past a mere necessity, and has become a lifestyle – the great and decadent age of the barbecue. These are not merely men singing about their hobby – it is a celebration of the life-in-death that is a key component of their chosen ritual.
Death metal bands take a curious view of the traditions of the past, invoking imagined occult practices of pagan days that have more in common with twentieth-century fiction than the lost rites of the ancients. While Pit Lord embrace these trappings, they do so with a crazed postmodern atavism that far outshines the zeal of any would-be Satanist. For the rituals they embrace have true, measurable power- caloric power. The consumption of meat is an alchemy practiced daily by millions who give no thought to the magic worked by its chemical processes. That which was living is made dead; the flesh left behind is consumed by the living, who by its consumption gain the power to perform all manner of earthly deeds. It is a process far more powerful than any Eucharist, for no pageantry is needed.
And yet they embrace the pageantry, the ancient celebration of the Feast. When the two men who comprise Pit Lord take the stage, to sing their pummeling songs of meat worship, their true instrument is center-stage: the enormous smoker with which they prepare their chosen sacrament. It is a fitting representation of the fusion of old-time barbarism with the dread and fatal technology of the modern age, a fusion they celebrate on their third full-length, Massive Grilling Capacity. The album will be released on Friday, July 18, and Pit Lord are celebrating its release with a live performance at the Raccoon Motel (315 East Second Street, Davenport IA).
Joining Pit Lord for the release show are Bear Mace from Chicago, whose new album Slaves of the Wolf is one of the finest of the year, metal or otherwise. Two new Quad Cities death metal bands are opening: DirtGod and 12 Gauge Autopsy. Doors are at 6 p.m., the show is at 7 p.m.; tickets are $20 at the door. Pit Lord will also be appearing at the second annual Iowa Metal Underground Fest at Cedar Rapids' Olympic South Side Theater on August 9.
Beyond merely celebrating the alchemical ritual of converting one form of flesh into power for another, Massive Grilling Capacity lays out the new Pit Lord mission – to bring together a new cult of the Pit, in preparation of a new age of flavor and pleasures unlimited. These men are warriors in an age in which past barbarism is replaced by destruction from afar. The Cult of Pit Lord play music that provides an outlet for violence, and provides a common spiritual link for those left adrift in this ages where the old gods have fallen and been made ridiculous. The title track of the album provides thus:
“Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here from every corner of the earth
Today we stand united, not by chance but by design
From distant lands, from cultures far removed, we have converged upon this very spot
. . . in celebration
It is a reckoning, a gathering of forces
Forces bound not by tradition . . . but by something far darker
It is the primal hunger that surge within us all
The fire …. before us, a symbol of destruction and creation
Of flames licking the night air
As they transform humble ingredients into something more
The meat sizzles, the smoke rises, and with it the sense of indulgence
Every bite, every morsel you consume today is not just nourishment –
It is power, power we share and power we wield
. . . We are not really eating, we are unleashing our collective might upon this world.”
As everything goes up in smoke, they will use that smoke to cook their last roast, spitted on axles of vehicles left useless for all else but the final Bacchanal, the ending feast of the Holocene age and the opening salvos of the Age of Flavor.
Primitive Man's return to the Quad Cities on July 27 (also at the Raccoon Motel) is no less notable an occasion. Such is the massive, brutal simplicity of their music that little description is necessary. Fully embodying all connotations of the word “doom,” their forbidding, drawn-out sludge moves with the steady, inexorable momentum of a concrete-encased bulldozer, a bulldozer with an air-raid siren mounted on top Blues Brothers-style, screaming “I warned you!” as the signal decays into complete unintelligibility.
Local openers The Hunting Grounds DeathCult tread a similar, though comparably lighter path, with a stripped-down fusion of metal, noise, and power electronics melting down into a post-industrial racket redolent of howls from a burned-out slagscape. 12 Gauge Autopsy are on this one as well, balancing things out with some more straightforward death metal. Doors are at 6 p.m., the show's at 7 p.m.; admission is $20 for those 21 and older.
