By Andrew Bansal
June 15th 2013, Century Media Records Parking Lot, Hawthorne CA: Veterans of the old-school metal guard Hirax, along with thrashers of a newer generation Bonded By Blood, took the stage in the Century Media Records parking lot yesterday for the label’s ‘Noize In The Hood’, a free event comprising of live performances by these two bands, some of the Century Media bands doing signings, and cheap CM merchandise for sale. When I first saw the announcement for this show, I thought to myself, ‘What better than a free Hirax show on a Saturday afternoon?’ It being a free of cost, all ages show, I was expecting a massive turnout and was certainly looking forward to seeing Hirax again for the first time since December 2011. I arrived at the venue at around 12.30 with great anticipation of a fun-filled Saturday afternoon metal show, not knowing what to expect but hoping for an enjoyable event.
Despite having the whole morning to themselves to set up their gear on stage, being the first and only opening band of the show, Bonded By Blood still somehow managed to start 10 minutes later than their scheduled set time of 1 PM. Ever since they got stripped down to a one-guitar band a couple of years ago, I have never been able to truly enjoy their live shows no matter where I’ve seen them, at venues big and small. It just never matches up to the sound they had with two guitarists in the band, specially in the live setting where I certainly feel the sole guitarist Juan Juarez needs somebody else to bounce riffs and solos off of. Not only that, his lack of expression and crowd interaction definitely warrants the need for a livelier, flashier second guitarist. They did invite a friend of theirs to jam on guitar for the song ‘Show No Fear’ towards the end of the set, and it sounded tenfold better than anything else they played. They always were, and should be a 2-guitar band, it’s as simple as that.
With that said, vocalist Mauro Gonzalez always brings it with his on-stage energy and is the band’s driving force. His band mates did a fair job on their instruments as well, and if you consider their current lineup as a totally separate entity without comparing it to previous ones, they still sounded good up there. But a couple of times during the set, they faced power outages which didn’t help at all, as there were long delays in between some of the songs and made for a tediously and unnecessarily long set. Nonetheless, despite the mishaps the band put on a decent show.
Set List:
1. Civil Servant
2. Mind Pollution
3. Tormenting Voices
4. Prison Planet
5. Blood Spilled
6. Aftermath
7. Repulsive
8. Crawling
9. Show No Fear
10.Restless Mind
11.Another Disease
After BBB were done, Watain mainman Erik E. Danielsson was seen signing autographs and taking pictures with fans in the artist tent, which saw White Wizzard and Warbringer do signings earlier in the day. It was great to hang out with that crazy dude again. Hirax were supposed to hit the stage at 2.45, but there were further delays as power outage marred the start of the set. Finally at around 3, they got their show going. As his band mates began playing, Katon W De Pena with his customarily fierce facial expression and bestial vocals appeared on stage, much to the delight of the smallish number of fans and onlookers gathered here, and truly kicked this set into gear. But shortly after, there was another power outage, and shortly after that, there was yet another. I was very much stoked to see Hirax myself and politely made my way into the front row at the beginning of the set, but the power outages became so frequent that it got too frustrating to even be able to enjoy the band’s actual performance.
At one point, those poor souls didn’t even know whether they would be able to finish a song without getting cut off. Every time they were interrupted, the life out of that particular song was completely taken out, and they rightly just moved on to the next song in such cases. It was a sad predicament to be in for a fantastic band that always puts on a killer live show. But to their credit, I thought they handled themselves much better than a lot of other bands would have. In reality I was half-expecting them to throw a hissy fit, but they kept their cool throughout the situation, and Katon being never short on words, simply kept talking to the crowd while the technical issues were sorted. It almost became a spoken-word performance. But thankfully, power issues were fixed and there was no outage during the last few songs. So unfortunately, what could have been a great Hirax set was ruined by external factors not under their control.
Besides the live music, of course there were other aspects I was noticing. The turnout was shockingly disappointing, as I expected a lot more people to come in for this free event. May be it’s another indicator of the lack of support for local, non-mainstream shows from the so-called ‘community’. In terms of the organization of the event itself, this was most probably the very first time this label has done something of this kind, so I’ll cut them some slack but have to point out that the power outages were embarrassing for one and all, and with the sun being directly overhead at that time of the day it would have made a lot of sense to provide some kind of shade over the stage and the audience, which they didn’t.
All in all, a decent event and I would commend everyone involved in it for the effort they put in. I’m sure lessons have been learnt from this, and the next time a similar thing is attempted, the outcome will hopefully be better.
Hirax Set List (severely interrupted by power outages):
