Sunday, July 17, 2011

LOCAL CONCERT ALERT (The Bear Hunters), Rotaryfest Fallout, And Our First Taste Of Great Bodily Harm!!

It's time to dive into the old news desk with a packed post today, including Rotaryfest fallout (particularly the metal & hard rock aspects), and our first glimpses at a new local metal band! However, we'll lead off with a LOCAL CONCERT ALERT, so here's what you need to know!

All ages concerts have been popping up very rapidly in recent weeks, from July's metal-driven Titan's Eve and Sanktuary shows to next month's Alcoholic White Trash-headlined concert. Well, add another one to the schedule, as another all ages show at The Oddfellows Hall is now official for August 12th! One metal band is confirmed for the show so far, that being melodic death metal quintet The Bear Hunters, marking their third all ages show of the summer. Awesome to see them back at The Oddfellows Hall, they'll tear it up! The rest of the lineup so far is a mixed bag of styles, but there's a lot of great stuff to be had, including the reunion of Smeltzer as the headliners! Yes, the popular alt-punk trio last featuring RedD Monkey frontman Steve Mozarowski, bassist Paul Stanghetta (of The Fury), and former RedD Monkey/Gates of Winter drummer Kevin Overton will reunite for presumably one night only on August 12th, which should be awesome! No word if this exact lineup will be back, but fans should be excited for their return, as Smeltzer were a popular and loyally followed local band in their mid-2000s heyday! Conveniently, RedD Monkey will also play this concert as the co-headliners (no word on a possible Fury return yet, though it seems like an ideal time for one), and local indie rockers The Tenagens have also been confirmed as openers. More bands are to be announced, so I'll let you know when announcements are made!

This show will have a $5 cover charge, a 7:00 PM start time, and as said above, this is an ALL AGES event! For all current and future details, visit the official Facebook event page! I used to really enjoy Smeltzer back in the day, so their return alone is worth hitting, but with the potential for a huge amount of bands (including The Bear Hunters), this show will likely get even better over the next few weeks! As more updates come in, I'll have them here!

Next up, do you remember the Sault Michigan metal band Great Bodily Harm? They're the newer local supergroup featuring former Hammerspace singer Kirk Labadie, Swampghas drummer Doug Reed on guitar, River Witch bassist Chris Leask, and End of Existence frontman Bob Helsten on drums. You may remember them as the openers for a Half A Man concert in April, followed by a slot at LemmaFest last month, but without a visible internet page or media, we couldn't say too much about them. Well, now we can, as three original demos from Great Bodily Harm are now on YouTube, thanks to YouTube user panzertera (who is likely a band member, though I can't prove which one.) These songs were actually uploaded in March & April, but without a local credit to the videos, I wouldn't have found them, so thanks to Doug's Swampghas bandmate Jason Mills for verifying that with me! So the three posted Great Bodily Harm songs are called "You Don't Even Know", "Jaw Breaker", and the intentionally misspelled "Cuntrol", and their sound is quite promising! Think of it as a mix between 1990s groove metal and hardcore, similar sounding to bands like Pro-Pain. Kirk's singing is much heavier than his Hammerspace work, and Doug's riffs are crushing! I'm eager to hear more from Great Bodily Harm, hopefully they finally start an internet page of some kind!

I'll embed "Jaw Breaker" here, but all the songs are very heavy and worth checking out, so visit the above links for your first online tastes of Great Bodily Harm! As I hear more, I'll let you know, but here's one of their first original songs, "Jaw Breaker"!



Finally for today, here's some fallout from this year's Rotaryfest stages, seeing as our annual summer festival is now in the books for another year! Firstly, local news site Local2 was on hand to film The Stage at Clergue Park, where they got video footage of almost every band from all three nights of music! Only Fusion was left out, to my knowledge, I wonder why? Lots of solid (though unembeddable) video footage was taken by Local2's Mike Caruso, though his camera made many objects have squiggly lines in fast motion. Click here to see Thursday's "Blues In The Park" bands, but if you're looking for hard rock, the video from Friday will have you covered, as it has some footage of local classic hard rockers That's Chester covering Deep Purple's "Highway Star" from Friday's lineup! It's not full (cutting off before the 3 minute mark), but the quality's great and the band are in top form! Click here for to see most of Friday's bands, and That's Chester's segment starts at 6:22 into the video. As for last night's Rotaryfest main stage lineup, there's a video for that too, which you can view at this location, and it gives us our first video glimpse at local classic hard rockers Full Circle! Sadly, they only get barely a minute of screen time, but I can tell you a few things, including that the video is from their cover of the song "Alone" by Heart!

I don't have a huge glimpse of Full Circle here to accurately compare them to the last Turner Up lineup I saw live (the Krista Marshall fronted lineup from earlier this year), but KT Antler has some real pipes on her, and Kyle McKey shows some good energy on guitar! Hopefully we get some longer video soon, but this is better than nothing! Check the above links to give the Saturday main stage lineup a look, and Full Circle's portion begins at around 13:20 of that video. Other local news sites didn't devote large coverage to the main stage, but the Tenaris Second Stage has lots of stuff to share! No metal bands played on the outdoor stage on Queen Street East this year, but SooToday's massive photo album and some more Local2 videos (viewable here) will give you some very nice glimpses into the Second Stage, where local metal alumni like Glen Thomas & Chris Smith (Wishbone), Joel Poluck (Mora Lee Sound), and Alex White (Cowboys & Indians) rocked out to a large audience! Also of note: Sativa Rose guitarist Andrew Angelic played with Cowboys & Indians on Friday as their temporary live guitarist, and you can see him in the photos and video footage as well! Looks like this year's Rotaryfest stages were big successes, so check out all of the above links for all the Rotaryfest musical fallout, and I'll have more if it emerges!

That's all for today, but stay tuned TOMORROW for the final results of last month's poll and the debut of our new poll, where you can pick your favourite concerts of the first half of 2011! Stay tuned, thanks everyone!

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