Cascadia Calling, 2025.12.15
the first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to and the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night
When I first moved to Seattle in 2010, I went to rock shows about once a week on average. Sometimes I’d go to two or three in a week or just show up at a venue to see what was playing that night if I was in the neighborhood. Between the Crocodile, Neumos, and a half dozen smaller venues with shows most nights, I was spoiled for choice. As is the nature of the human psyche under such wonderful abundance, I eventually became complacent and my show-going dropped off considerably. In the wake of Covid, I’m now lucky if I average one show per meteorological season. So it was a pleasant return to form for me to see two shows this past week, even if I didn’t attend them with such cavalier ease as I did in my 20s.
Bells ring in the tower, wolves howl in the hills
Chalk marks show up on a few high windowsills
After some logistical travails, I caught the Mountain Goats at the Knitting Factory in Spokane. I’m enough of a Mountain Goats fan that I’d also had tickets to see them two days prior in Seattle, but ended up having to cross the mountains early and so only saw them once this tour.
It’s a strange element of the Northwest that crowds for rock shows East of the mountains are always better than those West of them. Maybe it’s the coastal gloom or the history of Grunge-induced irony poisoning, but Seattle has some of the tamest, lamest crowds I’ve ever seen. Whatever sedative is at fault, it’s clearly not present in Spokane. Even watching the show from the balcony-level bar with my friend Paul, the entire venue was electrified for the entire set.
The set opened with the instrumental overture off of the latest record, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, which—coupled with the lack of an opening band—set a strong tone for the show. Despite the narrative structure of the new record and starting with its opening, they played surprisingly few tunes from it, instead mixing some highlights from it with plenty of older tracks for their discography. The selections they did choose to play from the new record surprised me, to be honest. Neither “Your Bandage” nor “Rocks in My Pockets” strung me as strong candidates for anchoring a live performance, but both were great when stripped down for a live performance.
One interesting thing about the new songs is that, with the four-piece touring band, they sounded much more like traditional Mountain Goats songs. They gain energy even as they lost a little bit of the lush texture of the composition on the record. It’s a testament to the depth of the songs that they can retain their character even while being recast into something noticeably different and more energetic on a live stage.
There was also what I would describe as appropriate levels of fan service. The inclusion of “In League With Dragons”, “Sax Rohmer #1”, and the unreleased-but-fan-favorite “You Were Cool” seemed laser-targetted to appealing to three different kinds of Mountain Goats fans. They capped this off, of course, by belting out “This Year” to a massive pop from the crowd. (Another song in a similar vein that got a giant, enthusiastic sing-along was “Cold at Night”, off the new record, which I could see becoming another “This Year”-type survival anthem.)
The Mountain Goats are, as ever, an incredible live act, and well worth it if you’ve ever liked anything from their 23 studio albums spread over a 30 year career.
The fortress burns
Broken my heart
I leave this world
All Gods are gone
It’s easy to forget these days that heavy metal as a genre has always been irredeemable nerd shit. I say this as someone who is an unreformed and unrepentant (though these days, largely non-practicing) nerd. Anyone who has fallen into the notion of classic metal as the purview of rough, serious-thinking folks, could disabuse themselves of the notion by going to a single Blind Guardian show.
I caught Blind Guardian at the Showbox this past week. Their high-fantasy power metal schtick is still fun, and heavy metal fans, being less irony-poisoned than the average PNW-er, make for better crowds. I commented to my friend Ian (tall, broad-shouldered, mohawk-wearing) that I kept seeing people in the crowd I thought I knew, but I realized they’re just cut from the same cloth as a lot of my friends, and I’m not used to seeing so many metal nerds in one place.
I have to confess that, despite my life-long love of metal, I’ve never been a massive Blind Guardian fan. They seem like they should have been laser-targeted towards me in my teenage Dragonlance books and power metal phase, but I don’t think they penetrated the sinister warding spell that kept small American towns complete cultural deserts in those days. If they sold their CDs at Hastings or played them on the public access metal show on Wednesday nights at the community college, I must have missed them.
The Blind Guardian set itself was polished and played completely straight, as it has to be. In order to sell metal ballads about heroes saving fantasy lands from evil wizards, you cannot have any self-doubt or any shred of self-doubt or self-consciousness. Frontman Hansi Kürsch grinned and belted his way through every song. At his age and dressed in a collared shirt, he looked a bit as if he’d just gotten off a shift managing a Radio Shack.
The crowd and pit responded to his enthusiasm. My friends and I watched from the raised club section. One of the great joys of being an aging metal fan is the ability to enjoy the show with table service and a view of the crowd surfing, rather than being one of the people passing a body forward to the waiting arms of security.
One side benefit of the show was that it introduced me to the Finnish Power Metal band Ensiferum who I instantly took a liking to. As with Blind Guardian, their face-painted, leather-clad pseudo-Viking shtick could be lame if done half-heartedly or with any sense of ironic detachment. By committing to it entirely they sold it and turned it into complete and commanding stage presence. They looked every bit like marauders yanked from a niche fantasy novel, stuck in synthetic leather, and taught how to shred. Their galloping, soaring brand of guitar-centric metal lit up the venue and won me over as a fan.
Mark Fisher talked about music of interiority vs exteriority. Roughly, introspection vs pure aesthetic. Metal has always been aesthetically maximalist (this is one major reason why it, regrettably, attracts more than its fair share of fascists), and both Blind Guardian and Ensiferum demonstrated the power of that stance. I highly recommend seeing either of them if you get a chance, even if you don’t know their music, the spectacle will be worth it.