San Francisco band Deafheaven performed at the Ground Theatre in Singapore’s *SCAPE installation on Monday, July 15th. I was introduced to their music several years ago when I heard their acclaimed 2013 album Sunbather. Some have categorized Deafheaven’s sound as ‘blackgaze’. This means it combines the screeching vocals and apocalyptic edge of black-metal music – the subgenre that began in the 1980s with the likes of Bathory, Mercyful Fate and Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s greatest-ever metal band Venom, and gained notoriety in the 1990s with Norwegian black-metal bands like Burzum and Emperor, some of whose members were not adverse to burning down churches and murdering each other – with the more reflective, swirly, dreamy sound of the 1980s shoegaze movement that embraced bands like Ride, Lush, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Swervedriver and the masterly My Bloody Valentine.
Initially, I have to admit, that sounded to me like a marriage made in hell. However, when I listened to Sunbather, I was pleasantly surprised. I found its songs intense but also captivating.
© Sargent House
Fast-forward eight years to 2021, and Deafheaven released their fifth and most recent album Infinite Granite. This took the bold step of toning down the black-metal element in their sound, with singer George Clarke providing ‘clean’ – i.e., non-growly – vocals, and emphasizing the shoegaze component. Infinite Granite got some excellent reviews in mainstream outlets. In the Guardian, for instance, it was given a five-star rating and praised as ‘rock at its most majestically beautiful’. However, not all of the heavy-metal world was taken with its less abrasive approach. In his monthly roundup Columnus Metallicus in The Quietus, for example, Kez Whelan described it as Deafheaven’s “most drab, soulless outing yet, a conveyor belt of clean, perfectly pleasant but entirely unexciting jangle pop that sounds uncannily like an assortment of American Football B-sides.” Ouch. You spurn heavy metal at your peril.
Anyway, not knowing what to expect, I went to the Ground Theatre on Monday evening. The venue was surprisingly cavernous, with a high ceiling, and though the gig was sold out the premises looked like they could have accommodated a bigger crowd. The disparate elements in Deafheaven’s sound was mirrored by the variety of T-shirts being worn by the audience. In addition to the bog-standard heavy-metal T-shirts (like Slayer), I saw Goth (Siouxsie and the Banshees), electronica (Crystal Castles) and, yes, shoegaze ones (Slowdive). Though I’m not sure what the lady in the Heart T-shirt was expecting.
The support band tonight was a Singaporean outfit called Naedr, who allowed me to sample another hybrid subgenre I’d heard about, but never before experienced live – they proclaimed themselves a screamo band. Screamo, according to Wikipedia, “is an aggressive subgenre of emo… strongly influenced by hardcore punk.” To be honest, Naedr sounded pretty metallic to my ears. But I enjoyed them.
Before the main attraction came onstage, I tried to position myself appropriately – close enough to the stage to get a decent view of the band and feel the full force of their music, but not so close that I got sucked into any moshing that might break out among the more excitable spectators at the front. I have nothing against moshing, but I’m a frail old man now and my body can’t handle such violence.
And then Deafheaven’s five members emerged into the stage-lights and got down to business. It was an impressive performance, helped a lot by George Clarke’s antics as front-man. He leered, glared, pointed and gesticulated fiercely at the audience, looking rather like the actor Matthew McConaughey – a younger, messianic and rather demented version of him.
The first part of their set consisted of older numbers, including Sunbather, the title song from their groundbreaking 2013 album. I should say that when they started playing material from Infinite Granite, namely the songs In Blur and Great Mass of Colour, and Clarke’s shrieking black-metal vocals suddenly gave way to conventionally sung ones, the tonal shift was jarring. But I found their new stuff as hypnotic as their old stuff. It was a gig where it was best to switch off your forebrain and simply immerse yourself in the tide of noise advancing out of the speakers. That was true of both the more aggressive and the less aggressive songs in the band’s repertoire.
And, though I didn’t hear anyone in the crowd complaining afterwards, it was probably sensible that they kept the hardcore metallers happy by ending the gig with Dream House – the stormer that was the opening track on Sunbather back in 2013 and that first marked Deafheaven as a band to take notice of.