“Being in a band…a lot of people in bands get it in their heads that you’re their fans and they’re fucking cool. Any real underground artist doesn’t think that way; we are the luckiest people in the world.”
These words were uttered by Terror’s lead singer, Scott Vogel, through many deep breaths, 11 songs into the band’s explosive set last night in San Francisco. Why would Terror consider themselves the luckiest people in the world They’re a angry group of dudes from southern California who have never had a song on the radio, never toured with any bands who we see on TV, or read about in magazines, and they have definitely never done an interview with Jimmy Fallon. Terror is a self-sustainable hardcore machine that will never cross over into mainstream success, but that’s perfectly acceptable.
Last night, at San Francisco’s Thee Parkside, Bane and Terror co-headlined a hardcore show the SF scene will remember for ages. Originally, H2O was headlining this tour, but dropped off the final leg due to personal circumstances. Instead, we had Bane, the Boston outfit who not only pioneered the Boston sound that bands would copy for the next decade, but have outlasted a number of their peers making them one of the last original bands of that scene (besides maybe Converge and Blood for Blood). Not to mention Terror is probably the biggest and most important band to come out of the modern California hardcore scene. And to open up the show, newcomers Backtrack and CoSigned outfit Code Orange Kids stoked the audience, proving the next generation of hardcore still can pay tribute to the classics and have a few tricks up their sleeve.
It’s hard to compare this show to any hardcore show I have ever necessarily been to. It’s not every day you get two magnum giants like Bane and Terror in the same room. It was the best of the east and west uniting on one stage. Replacing Bane with H2O was the work of a genius. It’s the equivalent of owning a pistol and a shotgun and then trading them in for assault rifles; everything suddenly gets dangerous. Terror delivered a high-energy by blasting through songs like “Stick Tight”, “One with the Underdogs”, and “Always the Hard Way.” Meanwhile Bane had people toppling over onto their stage throughout their entire set, as they got the crowd to help them belt out songs like “Ali vs. Frasier,” “Can We Start Again”, and “Ante Up”. It was a night of stage-dives, crowd-surfing, screaming until your vocal chords fried, and sweat.
The thing is, bands like Terror and Bane will always be able to play a show like this. Despite the fact Terror drops a full length every year, and Bane hasn’t put out a record in three years, that will never affect the attendance of these shows. As cliché as it sounds, hardcore is a bonding genre of music. As long as people still love hardcore, these bands will always have an audience ready to dive on top of their peers and scream alongside them. They will be remembered in a sense that a lot of other acts won’t — their legacy will live on long past them within the scene, and everybody will talk about how lucky they were to see a combination like this on stage. They won’t go down in any major history books, but they will maintain integrity far beyond their career. That is why bands like Bane and Terror are the luckiest people in the world.
Photos and gallery by Ted Maider.
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