Skip to main contentBaltimore seems to inspire mordant and strange imaginations. The city gave us Poe in the 19th century and John Waters in the 20th. This week, two Baltimore bands that lay bony hands on the city's weird traditions visit Portland, exploring entirely different shadowlands.
The Convocation Of... pursues a strategy of tension and release, the focus and chaos of guitarist Tonie Joy, bassist Guy Blakeslee and drummer George France vaporizing the usual boundaries of the "power trio." Joy's reedy voice occasionally wails black prophecy above the storm. In its sheer force, Convocation Of... is loosely comparable to two of Joy's earlier bands, mid-'90s underground hardcore sensations Universal Order of Armageddon and the Great Unraveling.
In both of those bands, Joy shared the stage with bassist Anthony S. Malat, who now plays in Love Life. If it weren't for the black-eyelined baggage the term carries, you could call Love Life's sinister dirge-blues "Gothic." Malat's bass coils like a thick black lash around Sean Antanaitis' spiny guitar and David Bergander's hammering drums. Singer Katrina Ford lends the band a decidedly feminine perspective, though it's expressed in a growl of near-masculine depth.
Two bands, two aberrant strains of artful depravity. WW asked members of both just what it all means.
TONIE JOY, THE CONVOCATION OF...:
"Heavy music moves you, and that can mean Black Sabbath or it can mean Fela Kuti. The most important thing isn't really evoking the tension, but alleviating it. I know all three of us have found that the music that touches us the most has that liberating aspect.
"In the rock realm, I don't think there are too many bands that mesh the way we do. It's more reminiscent of the way avant-garde jazz bands played in the '50s and '60s. We're not at that level technically, but that's the way we try to create. One friend of mine said, 'God, it's crazy, but George plays melodies on the drums.' While that's not right in a strictly technical sense, a layman who'd never heard a drummer play that way might hear it like that.
"Baltimore is an interesting city, but it's not really a musical mecca. That makes it easier to reach out to people who might not be familiar with the sorts of scenes or bands we've been involved with in the past. Every time we play, there are people who come up afterward and say, 'Man, you guys are fucking crazy. Who are you?' That's always a good feeling."
KATRINA FORD, LOVE LIFE:
"I love tragedy, completely. That is my personality, and that's what I bring to the band. I don't like women to play the victim's role, so I try to turn the tables. In the stories I tell, the women tend to be the victimizers. We don't contrive some specific image. We each bring our own talents and personalities to the band, and that combination is what makes it what it is.
"Sean and I both played in a band called Jaks in Chicago, and we played with Anthony when he was in UOA a lot of times. When we started playing together, we decided we wanted to get away from our pasts. We're getting away from psychotic rock. Dave, the drummer, has almost a classic-rock style, and he pushed us even further away from what we'd been used to.
"I started to appreciate music outside my own genre. I started to get into more old-time music, music that told its story in a more subtle way. I think we've all become more patient."
Satyricon, 125 NW 6th Ave., 243-1280 10 pm Monday, Oct. 8 Cover
Blackbird, 3728 NE Sandy Blvd., 282-9949 9:30 pm Tuesday, Oct. 9 $7
WWeek 2015