The eternal dream. Pursuing it looks naff. But it lurks inside. It guides. It prods. It doesn’t let you go. But it’s ephemeral enough that it can’t lead. Some let it overwhelm them. Some of them end up dead. Some who could achieve it never manage to harness its energy, choosing a path less perilous.
Spend some time watching dUNETX mainman Chris Sacco on stage and you know it’s in there. But what he does with this song is staddle that line between embracing it and observing it from a safe distance. Musically, it gets on a mid-tempo rail and rides. But the lyrics flip back and forth between the simultaneously personal and universal (rolling up on that special someone) and the more rarified air of megalomania (closing your eyes and coming undone)
dUNETX has always worn its influences on its sleeve and this particular number draws from the Smashing Pumpkins end of the band’s pool. Both guitars and vocals drone while rubbing your eardrums. But they also build with enough wiggle to move things forward, keeping the listener waiting for the next bend. Surely something has to give.
Guitar Solo One yields. Guitar Solo Two builds. And then reality breaks. Icon, that’s the way it has to be. You got your rock star type clothes on. Where’d you get those threads? You used to be Jimi Hendrix? Or was that the Doors?
It’s amazing how fresh some things can sound. Like, always. dUNETX sounded current 25 years ago. Guess what. They still sound happening in the 21st century.
New track ‘Get It Together’ puts you on a playground from the jump. You know that feeling when you’ve hit the sweet spot on the merry-go-round? Holding on just fine but going fast enough that it feels like you’re flying. That’s where you are when this song begins.
What follows is what you might get if the Partridge Family were a rock band that smoked weed and played loud, swirly poppy happiness with grit. The bridge slows things down but gets rhythmic rather than dreamy, followed by a solo that’s both!
Nestled in the same neighborhood as Tripping Daisy and The Dandy Warhols, ‘Get It Together’ is dUNETX at their Primal Scream-iest.
“Why don’t you just fly-eye-eye so high?”/like a kite string that never pops/ “Oh hell yeahhhh!”
You can snag ‘Get It Together’ at your favorite streaming site. And the good news doesn’t stop there. The classic dUNETX albums ‘Machowagon’ and ‘Goldenarm’ are also available for the first time on all major streaming platforms.
Power Trip has been my favorite band since the first time I saw them. I love them the same way I used to love bands as a teenager, excited by every bit of news and every show announcement. It never occurred to me that I’d ever feel like this about a band again, but here I am. Despite 30 years in and around the music business, I’m once again just unconditionally, unprofessionally geeked about something.
Blake Ibanez (lead guitar), Chris Ulsh (drums). Chris Whetzel (bass), Nick Stewart (guitar), and Riley Gale (vocals) brought it 100% every time they hit the stage. But that was only half the equation. Power Trip’s fans brought the rest. You had a decision to make each time you went to a show. Were you going to be part of the mayhem? Or simply watch it unfold? Either way good times lay ahead.
I had a really chill talk with Whetzel once when they were touring with Napalm Death. Just two dudes standing in the back of Numbers main room waiting for the next band to come on. But that’s the only contact I’ve ever had with the band or anyone to do with it.
When I heard the news of Riley’s death a year ago today it felt like my head was going to collapse. Beyond being a generational front man, he had been proof-of-concept for the idea that a normal guy, the kind of guy you’d hang in the garage with just to kill time, a guy like ME, could actually do that job at the highest level. Neil Fallon (Clutch) and LG Petrov (Entombed) had both been relatable in their way, but Riley nailed it. Everything the Super-Me front man could be.
This extended off stage as well. One of my favorite social media runs ever was his 2017 Twitter feud with Proud Boys, calling them out en masse as lunatic dipshits long before most had ever even heard of them and inviting them to come down to the show for a talk.
Riley’s passing left a hole in my existential paradigm. It also simultaneously reignited some dormant fires and made me give a lot fewer fucks than I had.
I was actively looking forward to spending the next 20 years of my life watching Power Trip become the biggest heavy band on earth. Given the age difference, I was going to be watching new tours from the nursing home. Hell, maybe until I was dead! That whole segment of my life was locked down. They were on that kind of arc.
Along those lines, I really hope the rest of the band continues in some way. Riley might have been the focal point, but those riffs (drums included!) can’t be touched. Would love to hear more. It’s not like it’s without precedent for a band to return after the unexpected loss of its front man and brother.
In the meantime, enjoy my 10 favorite videos of Power Trip in action live, arranged chronologically so you too can have fun watching them grow.
Metal! The one true path.
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PS: I’d be remiss to not express my deepest condolences to the friends and family of Trouble/The Skull vocalist Eric Wagner. A potent, genre-defining force of his own, Wagner died this past Sunday at 62 from COVID complications. The Skull had played Houston just two weeks before, but the band pulled out of its Psycho Vegas slot last Thursday as Wagner’s condition worsened. Hopefully he, Riley, and LG have found each other and are having a great karaoke session. Here’s one of my favorites.
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On with the shows…
Together for three years when this was filmed, it’s still the oldest YouTube footage available of Power Trip; roughly 15 minutes of fun from Moshfest 2011 in Tyler, Tex. The aesthetic and setting are definitely hardcore, but metal is already baked into the riffs (not to mention Blake’s headbanging!) Already tighter than most bands and still just barely known outside of north Texas.
Here’s a little bonus fun from just a few weeks later, back home in Dallas at the now defunct 1919 Hemphill. Hammer of Doubt!
Fast forward to 2012 and things are starting to get scary. Dallas festivities surrounding Edge Day 2012. Though not a straightedge band, Power Trip, particularly through Riley, advocated continuously for the rights of the downtrodden. Anyway, check this out. You won’t be able to unsee it.
Just a couple of months after that mayhem, I encountered Power Trip for the first time. They were playing downstairs in the small room at Fitzgerald’s in Houston. Was a free show split between the venue’s two floors, w/Pallbearer, Venomous Maximus, Transmaniacon MC, Omotai, Eagle Claw, Mammoth Grinder, Warmaster, Oceans Of Slumber, and Peasant also performing.
Power Trip opened its set with the newly minted ‘Crossbreaker.’ I’d never heard a note of the band’s before music and hadn’t been part of a crowd like theirs in years. I was instantly and permanently hooked. They became my favorite band on earth that night and remain so to this day. Couldn’t be happier to have captured some of it on video.
Not quite the madness of the early home shows, but still super cool in its DIY vibe, Power Trip played the Metal Frat (Sigma Phi) at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Apr. 15, 2013. It was still two months before the release of the band’s Southern Lord debut, ‘Manifest Decimation,’ but all systems were definitely go.
Winter in Moscow. It doesn’t get much more hardcore than that. A fitting setting then (at the now closed Plan B) for Power Trip’s first ever headlining show outside the US. Sure, Blake’s guitar is super hot on this one, but the overall sound is ultra-live and reminds me of my favorite place to be at a show…anywhere you can hear the backline more clearly than the PA. It sounds just like you’re back in the garage.
Power Trip always kept up a frenetic pace at Austin’s annual SXSW festival, often packing three shows into a single day. 2014 was no exception. PBS’s ‘Everything But The News’ was in the house for the band’s afternoon outdoors Converse/Thrasher Deathmatch set at Scoot Inn, which drew an entertaining mix of true fans and surprised tourists. A few hours later they were tearing up the inside of Beerland as part of the Ground Control Day Party. Outdoors was a hoot as well, APD coming to shutdownTrash Talk’s set on the venue’s patio.
Summer in Philadelphia means it’s time for This Is Hardcore, the annual festival bringing heavy brotherly love to the maniacal masses. As an example of the fun on hand, just the ‘C’s of the 2014 lineup featured CIV, Code Orange, Converge, Crowbar, and Cruel Hand. Power Trip also played. Their set was captured by hate5six (aka Sandeep “Sunny” Singh). His videos always hit, this one is other worldly. Audio, video, editing: all 100/100. Some of the greatest live concert footage ever presented. BEHOLD!
“Spinkick for Jesus.” One year later and back in Philly. Welcomed as old friends in the house of hardcore, Power Trip had spent the bulk of the intervening 12 months on the metal road in North America touring in support of ‘Manifest Decimation.’ Not quite as incendiary as 2014, but the combination of band and videographer remains untouchable. Plus, there’s a guy dressed like a whoopee cushion. And two young women got engaged right before the set.
In 2018 Power Trip got the invitation to appear in Canada on House of Strombo, the concert series hosted from the house (like for real…furniture, kitchen, the whole nine) of CBC music interviewer George Stroumboulopoulos, joining the likes of the Charlatans, Behemoth, John Prine, and the Melvins as guests that year. There’s the occasional pensive face, but what’s going down is inescapable and masterfully captured. It’s likely the band’s most watched live set at 1.4 million views and counting, and it’s easy to see why.
One of the coolest things about watching Power Trip grow was the scale and fanaticism of welcome they got in parts of the world like Asia and Eastern Europe that most US-based heavy bands don’t even get to until they’re headlining the summer sheds and small arenas here. The band toured Southeast Asia in early 2020, and many of the sets are available to watch.
This one from February in Manila is my favorite. The venue’s popping, the band is on fire, and the sound quality might be the best of all of the vids shared here: everything louder than everything else, but all crystal clear.
Power Trip had started writing for a third album in late 2019. Within a few weeks of this set the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live music altogether. The band responded by going into the studio to begin pre-production. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you’re in Houston Thursday night this is going to be fun. REHAB on the Bayou, 1618 Enid, 8 p.m., $5
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Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) thinks “big tech” is out to get conservatives. If this is the case, maybe it’s because conservatives have spent years trying to convince the American people that “big tech” is out to get them, the people (and big tech’s customers). Or because conservatives somehow throw all their “businesses are people too and can run their affairs however they want because…FREEDOM!!!” out the window when “big tech” is involved. I guess a baker can choose who they sell cupcakes to, but Facebook can’t choose who gets to use its platform?
In any event, it’s definitely in conservatives’ best interests to play the victim in this instance. It helps obscure reality: that they are the roaches and “big tech” the flood light.
Jordan says the Republican position on big tech is simple: Don’t censor political speech. He casts this as virtuous in comparison with what he sees as the Democrats’ parsing of which tech companies are good and which bad. He and former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows are even pushing the theory that tech-focused bipartisan legislation making its way through Congress will cede control of the industry to Biden himself.
These are ridiculous positions to take. Corporations have been censoring political speech for as long as both have existed. You don’t have any more right to stand in my bar and spew political nonsense than I do to go to your church on Sunday and do the same. Either entity can bounce you at will. Tech companies are the same. They’re not a public service. They’ve never even positioned themselves as one. The only body prohibited from censoring our political speech is the government.
But if your only way to get votes is through fear, you need to invent a new boogeyman almost continuously. Yesterday it was cancel-culture. Today it’s big tech. Tomorrow…?
This guy is a clown. If he were really interested in solving the problem, he’d get involved with the legislative process. But no. He’d rather use his energy terrorizing voters.
And all this while there’re actual problems that need our attention.
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Teaching students that World War II veterans were given GI Bill benefits to help them is teaching history. Also teaching them that the bill was structured in such a way as to deliberately exclude black vets is teaching history while applying critical race theory.
In case you didn’t notice, Republicans are trying to cancel Major League Baseball because they object to its position on voting rights. And they’re carrying on as if they think they have a chance of doing so (#GetWokeGoBroke?…puhleaze).
That didn’t work so well with the kneeling and the NFL did it? Games are still selling out. TV contracts are still getting signed. When will they realize they’re outnumbered?
If you’re starting to get out into the world for the first time in…a long time, plan a trip to your local independent record store. Not only will you come home with something you’re happy you bought, but the visit will do wonders for your reorientation (nostalgia being the powerful drug it is), and you’ll help a business that (if it’s lucky) is only just now starting to emerge from a 12-month winter.
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American oilfield services and equipment sector employment rose by more than 23,000 jobs in March, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Higher crude prices are good for the industry and adding to payrolls to this degree is one of the clearest indicators yet that the industry is starting to feel like they’re going to stick around.
And in a win for the environment (and therefore all we creatures who live in it) the DC Circuit granted the Biden administration’s request Monday to vacate a rule left over from the Trump cabal that would have prevented the EPA from setting standards to reduce greenhouse gas pollution produced by so-called stationary sources, such as refineries.
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One of the things those afraid of “socialized medicine” wave around most frequently is the plethora of choices and lack of waiting our current system provides us. What a crock. I called to make my daughter a virtual appointment after school with her OB/GYN. Even on a remote basis they weren’t going to be able to get her in for 2 months with that timing. So now it’s tomorrow at 1:30. In the middle of the school day. Guess WE have to figure that out. While paying several thousand dollars/year in premiums. To be part of a network I didn’t choose. And then pay the doctor anyway to meet the deductible.
George Lynch and Corey Glover are both icons of the rock and metal worlds. And, lucky us, they’ve got new music out. Together! Ultraphonix—a four-piece featuring Lynch, Glover, drummer Chris Moore and bassist Pancho Tomaselli—have released a video for their first song ‘Walk Run Crawl,’ taken from debut album ‘Original Human Music’ out Aug. 3.
You can read more about the band and preorder the album here. The video is below.
This is vital, catchy hard rock, picking up where Lynch left off in KXM (he just keeps getting better) and featuring an inspired and important lyric.
Speaking of KXM, both Lynch and Glover appear multiple times in ‘What You Make It: The Authorized Biography of Doug Pinnick’ available for preorder on Kindle NOW, with hard copies out June 8.
Peace and The Chaos released its second record May 11, celebrating with a show at Rockefellers in Houston sandwiched between The Sonnier Brothers Band and Louisiana Yard Dogs. PATC’s set was a triumph, the crowd singing at full enough throat to be audible onstage during ‘Life’ from the band’s self-titled debut.
For those not familiar, Peace and The Chaos is a Houston/Beaumont blues and soul-based rock band that blends a good-time attitude with stellar musicianship and songs that are both memorable and meaningful.
Blake “Billy Beaumont” Sticker is the guitarist/vocalist/frontman. His affable stage presence belies a guitar approach that is simultaneously frenzied and emotive and a strong, smooth voice as comfortable crooning as belting.
Sticker, drummer Kenneth Q. Turner and bassist Lenwood Sonnier formed Peace and The Chaos more than 4 years ago, woodshedding for a year and half perfecting the material before playing out for the first time. Guitarist Wally Farkas is the band’s newest member, his full-volume 70s classic-rock riffing and full-pimp stage presence gelling perfectly with Sticker.
The band has made videos for three of their best: ‘Enemy’ from the debut and ‘Ms. Jones’ and ‘Remembrance’ from ‘…Black Heart.’ Between the three you’ll get a great feel for what this band is about. I urge you to have a listen.
[Also, you can read about Lenwood and Wally’s adventures with Doug Pinnick in ‘What You Make It,’ available for Kindle pre-order NOW, hard copy released June 8]
Chris Smith, Author 