words and photos by Lige Menard
Aloha cherished readers, tis good to share time and experience with you once again! As I travel down the road of writing these articles, I’m constantly reminded of the importance of fighting the FOMO. These literary labors of love are not meant to cater to our communal Fear Of Missing Out. Lo, brothers and sisters they are meant to combat the FOMO!
Listen, I applaud a healthy home life. Providing happiness and stability for our familiar inner circle of dependants is first and always foremost. I also get that most of us have to put in the hours on the man’s timeclock to make this happen. Work, home, work, home, wash, rinse, repeat. A cycle of necessity. Yet, no matter how successful or busy you are at the hacienda and professionally, if your not balancing your time with a measure of individual creativity and social connection, baby your Missing Out.
Even all slung up with a broken collar bone, I fought my FOMO July 31st, and made my way to the Texas Rose Saloon on M.L.K. In Beaumont. My broken wing and I were super jealous of you able bodied folk, for a mighty hammer fall of punk and indie garage metal crashed thunderously against our chests and the Rose’s tin-box walls!
Opening up the night was Dallas based SlothFist. Seemingly not too concerned with genre restraints, they mix a bit of pop-punk with a large dose of thrash and a scoche of hardcore. Frontman Eric Daniels kicked out some serious jams while rocking a sick pair of biker booty shorts under a clean shaved cranium. Daniel’s performance and appearance were a personification of IDGAF, and of being punk in drublic. Promoting their 2020 album The MothMan Is Real, and 2018’s Live Slow, Die Whenever, the set list was consistently aggressive, and a couple of my top track picks were NESterday and Lycanthropy. Gat’ dang them boys were a spiked punch bunch of TXpunx trying to get the crowd to burn that mother down¡!
Headlining the night was Into The Whale. A two piece crack pipe of grimy garage metal. Hailing from Denver, Colorado the band’s played Lollapalooza, ACL, and has opened for such groups as The Descendants, Gogol Bordello, The Offspring, and Jane’s Addiction. I snagged a copy of their 2018 EP Dopamine, which was produced in the Foo Fighter’s Studio 606.
Drummer Eric Riley pulled his rig up to frontstage and even turned em to the side. A relentless percussionist, Riley maintained an in in your face savage pace. Nate Valdez on lead vocals and guitar performed with an eclectic kinetic energy, crowding the mike, stomping round, and even scaling the drum kit and shredding from on high. He delivered lyrics with intense and no doubt real-feel facial expression. You just can’t fake that level of raw emotion. Thier sound had a slow heavy crawl reminiscent of the Deftones, yet unique to their own voice and vice’y vibe. Deep in a nation wide and Canadian tour, Beaumont was lucky to be a gig-stop along their way.
If you didn’t make it out to the Rose on the 31st, MFer you missed out on a mashup moshdown of some rad TXthrash and some drippy trip-metal! What you couldn’t make it out? I’m sore’y bout that, however there’s still a chance to pull a skank before summer’s end…