Noise Pollution #30: The Return

                                              Sure.

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Hi everyone, it’s been a minute. Almost a calendar year (or two fiscal years and seven seasons of TV since time has no real meaning in America anymore). In the last ten or eleven months I’ve been somewhat busy, releasing an album, had the ceiling in my apartment collapse resulting in a lawsuit against one of Richmond’s most well known slumlords, buying a house outside of the city in a neighborhood where everyone has “Take America Back” flags but refuses to give kids candy on Halloween (fucking socialism) and going on a mini-tour before settling back into the reality of constructing run on sentences for you to read on the shitter.

I had a lot of seasonal ideas to write about here, mostly due to Halloween and autumn, but then I got caught up in real life nonsense and it kept being pushed to the back of the line. So rather than try to think of some kind of Thanksgiving themed piece (or whenever this runs, I’m kind of just pissing into the wind here) I figured I’d keep this one to my favorite subject (myself) and chat a bit about the shows we just did and just how fucking different the landscape is six years off the road. I’ll toss in some music that I’ve been listening to in order to keep some assemblance of my previously used structure here. 

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Consistency

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Krieg hasn’t played any shows since we did the Red River Family Fest in Austin, 2017. We’d only played two shows that year, with the Decibel Metal and Beer Fest being the other. Frankly, these were both not our best showings. Mine, anyway. My head and heart were really out of the game at the time and the fact that Krieg was tossed on Red River because the entire lineup was there as Skáphe (sans myself) already and they had a cancellation weighed a bit on me, like it was a runner up prize instead of being there on my own merit. This isn’t to say it was a bad time, far from it., but I was starting to see that Krieg wasn’t going to go where I (at the time) wanted it to go. It’s not the most pleasant realization and it caused me to be even more difficult to work with and be around, hence why it was so fucking quiet for so long. 

You can listen to me prattle on until the host has to (politely) tell me to shut the fuck up about it on a few podcasts that were kind enough to tolerate my bullshit, so we’ll skip the redemption story. 

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Here’s my petition for another reissue since Discogs prices are…Discogs prices.

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Sometime earlier this year we finished Ruiner and were hit with the realization that we probably should play some shows. Before we started tagging onto bigger fests or doing shit like opening for Eyehategod I was really committed to smaller, more underground/indie/popular buzzword affairs and even dipped my toes into being a promoter for a few years, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on how to set shit up.Since we’re all middle aged and have jobs or other bands, a lengthy road commitment just wasn’t a viable option, so I figured we’d do a quick weekend jaunt to some of our usual spots, picking New York City, Providence and Philadelphia. Seemed easy enough. This was taking shape in March and we knew the record was hitting in October, so November before the weather turned to shit and the holidays made life more of a pain in the ass than the other ten or eleven months of the year  seemed the best choice.

Yeah, nah.

Providence was a breeze like always and we ended up booking at Dusk, which is one of my favorite places to both play and see a show. Philly as well, we were able to book at Kung Fu Necktie, which is my other favorite in the States. But NYC was a problem, even that early on, which should have been an omen. Vitus was already spoken for and the initial promoter we were going through had the communication skills for a pre “water, Helen” Helen Keller. It took weeks before we were given a venue, the Kingsland in Brooklyn. I’d never played it before or even been through it, but the moment I posted that was where the show was taking place I received a lot of messages telling me just how awful it was, “worst venue in Brooklyn” kind of shit. 

So, having all three dates set somewhat, we went about trying to find bands to play with. I’d made it a point to have as much involvement with the choices for opener as possible, out of an inflated sense of importance, but also because I wanted to make sure we weren’t just doing some kind of bullshit showcase. I knew I wanted Bastard Cross for Philly, they’d impressed the fuck out of me with their recordings. 

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The rest of the bands were a little more up in the air. I had lists. I was hoping for Cathedrals in the Night for Philly and maybe NYC and it looked like I got my wish. But finding other bands for NYC? Fucking nightmare. Lots of “maybes” or just ignored messages altogether. I eventually had to put out a “who wants to play this?” posting on the gutter that is my Facebook and fortunately found Forest Thrall. Everything was lining up, somewhat.

I’d pushed the shows aside for a few months, figuring everything was hunky fucking dory, plus Krieg’s drummer Jay was kind of forced into the management role. I’d tempered my expectations for the reception of “Ruiner” since “Transient” landed with a wet shit (thanks Candlelight). So when the record promos went out and people actually seemed to dig the fucking thing, it was both humbling and also changed the dynamic of everything. Shows started picking up interest. It seemed like we were rolling towards the momentum I had hoped for nearly a decade prior but didn’t really care about now. I mean, I cared, but I wasn’t prepared for it. Then, a few weeks before go time I received a message that Cathedrals in the Night broke up. At that point I was ready to check my life insurance to make sure my family was taken care of after I walked in front of a bus. Now I had to find two bands to cover Philly and NYC. I had a few bands offer but they wanted headliner money while having a local band fanbase. Or, and this is the nice way of saying they were dogshit, they “didn’t fit.” Two bands, however, did not fit that description, The Oracle for the NYC show and Unholy Altar for Philly. 

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              So we’re clear, I’m twice as old as anyone in any of the bands we played with in Philly. 

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And this is where I’ll leave us, to pick up another time down the road. As a teaser, since I’m sure this was completely enthralling, we had a check stolen out of our merch box that I’m still trying to have canceled and reissued a week later and I had a Lyft ride where the driver told me she was kicked off Uber for being suspected of driving drunk and that her brakes were bad. We had a good laugh at that one.

Anyway, it’s nice to be back and I appreciate the six of you who read this picking it back up as it were. Just because I was away doesn’t mean I stopped thinking of ideas for it, which I’m sure you’re waiting for with baited breath. See you soon.

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