Subtlety and screaming
Audio, Features, This Week's Edition, Video Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Luke Rogerson sits in his dim basement, balled up in an armchair. He’s explaining last night, when the sound guy stomped on the smoke machine half-way through the show because he’d forgotten about it earlier. The make-up smoke plumed up onto the stage, then out into the 200-strong mass of bodies pulsing to unforgiving drums and roaring guitar.
Rogerson joined Curse of One about a year ago, auditioning by rewriting one of the band’s thrash metal odes to female anatomy (“T&A”) as a precise, punctuated assault on privilege and power (“Breathe In the Silence”). Rogerson’s balance of aggressive screams and soaring vocals ensured his position as the band’s new frontman, and “Breathe In the Silence” replaced “T&A” in the band’s set list.
The four-piece, rounded out by drummer Ricky Dikens, bass player Kevin Dabarno, and guitarist Ben Cowan, continue to chug their way through the notoriously congested Moncton metal scene. An insistence on dynamics, Rogerson says, is what separates Curse of One from the pack.
But the band keeps a firm foot in the fundamentals. Dikens’ drums explode like gun powder choreography, with dancing tom triplets, smashing cymbals, and rampaging double-kickdrum. Dabarno’s bass is a steady boom in lockstep with Dikens, together holding down the bottom below Cowan’s roaring guitar. Cowan, the band’s sole guitarist other than occasional acoustic accompaniment by Rogerson, alternates between thick, hurled-brick rhythms and searing leads, throwing everything from arpeggio tapping to blues bends into his solos.
“People started yelling ‘Acoustic metal!’” Rogerson says of the band’s set intro, a soft minor piece that leads into the apocalyptic “Process of Elimination.”
Luke Rogerson on the subtleties of screaming your lungs out.
It’s Rogerson who leads the band’s contrast of unbridled aggression and break-down introspection. His vocal versatility opens unpredictable paths for the band, but his approach is always appropriate. “War On Us,” featured in the audio piece above, is a track stuffed with pulverizing drum marches and grinding guitar riffs. But Rogerson’s vocals break through the cacophony with bluesy vulnerability, before launching into warlord growls and militant howls.
With a quickly-expanding repertoire and a faster-growing audience, Curse of One is putting in its dues and reaping the rewards. The band plans a full-length release sometime within the next year, and meawhile will continue playing shows around the Maritimes. Link to the band’s MySpace.
Click play to listen.
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Posted by TJ Milburn
on Feb 24, 2010. Filed under Audio, Features, This Week's Edition, Video.
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