neurosis: live in nyc

The California metal band Neurosis played their first New York show in four years last night, and I have the terrible pictures to prove it.

The show was held at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. When I first read that, I pictured a classic, church-like structure: arced ceilings, lots of marble, some kind of candelabra (clearly, all the churches I’ve attended have been in Bram Stoker novels). In fact, if not for the weird Masonic banners hanging in the hallway, the Temple could have been any other punk club. Mastodon opened the show and were…fine. I like Mastodon well enough, but the venue didn’t play to their strengths. After a while, their lightning-fast riffing just liquified and pooled up.

Neurosis, though, was another story entirely. Their music was awesome and imposing, loud-beyond-loud, riffs crashing down slowly like blades in some enormous, rusted metal-press. Mastodon favored speed, but Neurosis was almost maddeningly sloooowww, each chord collapsing with incredible deliberateness, vocals awesomely disfigured by static and distortion. Theirs is death-crawl music, the sound of someone clawing his way through the desert at night, anvil on his back, buzzards at his throat. For most of the set, the only light came from the black & white films that were projected on to an enormous screen behind the band. The movies were like some kind of Melies nightmare: a round beam of light showing flowers shriveling, white horses galloping across black hills, crows circling a large stone tower and a long, ominous solar eclipse.

What’s more, it was body-rattling loud; I needed earplugs for my earplugs. There were points when I thought my chest would collapse: each chord walloped like a 750 pound medicine ball, and that sense of physical discomfort added to the music’s awful, evil impact. The feeling that arrived, over and over and over, was that the end was near, that it would be bloody, and that we’d all be dragged down to it whether we wanted to or not.

It wasn’t just brute force, though: Neurosis’ songs are meticulously constructed, insistent sledgehammer-thuds eventually giving way to long, sobbing guitar solos. But though their music is complex, it’s also awesomely resistant to intellectualization. Case in point: while they were navigating their way through a particularly tangled thicket of guitars, all I could think was how totally fucking evil the photonegative pack of wolves looked on the screen behind them. The experience was extraordinary, like being submerged by force in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. I just wish I got some better fricking pictures.