“Thou says free music downloads have earned the heavy metal band a following”

Thou says free music downloads have earned the heavy metal band a following

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 02:06 AM PST

Published: Monday, January 03, 2011, 4:00 AM

From Arson Anthem to Zebra, New Orleans has a long track record of generating crowd-pleasing heavy music. But unlike rap, another genre with deep Crescent City roots, it's not all that present in the traditional local venues where Louisiana's powerful and fertile musical heritage is celebrated.

The audible New Orleans stamp that boot-state bands put on punk and metal, however, is well-known in the larger communities that follow those sounds. And the perception that local metal bands get little respect hasn't stopped one such band, Thou, from soldiering on its own path for a half-decade.

The five-year-old quintet, which skillfully blends classic New Orleans doom metal with punk and methodic post-rock influences, is as screamy as they come. Onstage, the band makes a big noise. But offstage, the group has slowly cobbled together some of the most interesting music coming out of the venerable local hard rock and metal scene — and become a buzzed-about export with, perhaps, more recognition in Europe than in their native south Louisiana.

Thou formed in Baton Rouge in 2005, adding vocalist Bryan Funck, a veteran of the politically conscious New Orleans underground punk scene and founder of the alternative music-info website noladiy.org in 2007, and jazz-trained drummer Joshua Nee in 2010. Funck's raw vocals upped the punk ante; Nee's drumming loosened up the structure, the band members say, for more eclectic sonic forays.

The 2010 EP "Baton Rouge, You Have Much To Answer For" includes a nine-minute opus of crackling fuzz and vocal samples from movies. Recently, Thou recorded a track with Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship?, the sprawling accordion-and-horn-driven ensemble who will perform with them Monday night — not exactly a textbook metal move.

"We're not exactly the kind of band that has an agenda," Funck said.

Bands, such as Down and Mike IX Williams' Eyehategod and Outlaw Order, wrote the songbook on the New Orleans metal sound in the '90's with slow, sludgy, heavy guitar riffs that seemed to be plowing through the swamp. The latest crop of metal acts from south Louisiana seem to both nod to that heritage and update it.

The grinding, black metal-influenced Haarp, made its debut on Phil Anselmo's Housecore Records label in November. Tirefire, which includes more elements of hardcore punk's speediness and slam-danceability, released its new album Friday.

Thou, with its experimental dissonance, cryptically poetic lyrics, punk ethic and post-rockish sense of structure, is arguably the most complex of that new breed.

Their wide out-of-town fan base is due in part to almost the full catalog of Thou's recordings — three full-length albums, four EP's, three split albums, two split 7-inches, a boxed set and two early demo recordings — all available for free download online and released on various independent labels. Rather than a thick book of press clippings, however, their popularity in the online world has garnered them praise from music blogs and websites, such as BrooklynVegan.com or MetalUnderground.com.

Though Thou is not operating at the awards-show level of Pantera, which earned four Grammy nominations between 1995 and 2001, the band has generated a large body of work, crisscrossed the United States several times and traveled once to Europe, where they'll return for the month of June.

They've done SXSW in Austin, Texas; a tour with underground drone legends Sun O))) and the hipster-flashpoint Scion Rock Festival in New York. A planned tour of Japan was postponed, but a visit to Australia and New Zealand is on the calendar for late 2011.

In England and Ireland, as well as New York and Los Angeles, Gibbs said, crowds were often better than in the band's double hometown area of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The free downloads, he thought, definitely impacted record sales at out-of-town shows for the better.

"And soon, all of our music will be up for free," Funck said. (The latest full-length, album, Summit, is officially under embargo for a short time by Southern Lord records.)

"We basically just want people to have the music."

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Free Music Download

Tuesday, 4 January 2011