Extreme team

>> Cephalic Carnage and their ilk take it over the edge

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

Our need for excess may have planted its seed in the greedy '80s, but extremity hasn't really come home to roost until now. In our current accelerated culture, it seems like even our sweeping technology can barely keep up with our hunger for unadulterated over-the-topitude.

Just look around ya. Magazine racks in porno stores scream Barely Legal and Grandma's Hot Crossed Buns, while absurdly massive marital aids are offered behind the counter. Home video games feature "incredible, life-like" car crashes and decapitations as our bodies get festooned with pounds of metal jewellery.

We want more of everything and we want it right now, goddamnit! So go ahead and get that faster modem and smaller cell phone or jump out of that plane with a surfboard and supersize those fries because you're living in the extreme age.

But what's up with the music to provide the soundtrack for your quest for excess? 'N Sync? Celine Dion? R. Kelly? Mainstream music is living in the state of extremity--extreme shit. Would you actually surf the blue sky or attempt to insert a marital aid as big as Shaquille O'Neal's fist to the sweet sounds of Boys II Men? That's so '99!

One of the biggest forces in the underground scene right now is what's called extreme music, and it's got a rabid fanbase. This stuff doesn't merely placate the listener with predictable, danceable nursery rhymes but lashes out and lacerates the eardrum relentlessly. Tempos run from a zillion beats per minute to a slow, torturous grind. Vocals gnaw at your spine as tones go from head-splitting high squeals to bowel-emptying lows. Sounds good, huh? Well, it's better than good. It's pulverizingly brutal.

The current spearhead of this musical extremism can be found in the metal scene and one of the most extreme death bands happening right now is Colorado's Cephalic Carnage. Their self-described "Rocky Mountain hydro grind" takes the limp water guns out of the hands of Korn and Slipknot and converts them into raging semiautomatics. "We don't go out of our way to be brutal," says singer Lenzig. "We like to listen to jazz, classical and pop and when we try and write straight-up death metal, which we love, it just doesn't come out right."

Along with bands like Nasum and Dillinger Escape Plan, you really wonder just how much more extreme things can get before hitting a ceiling, but Lenzig promises the future looks bright for extreme music. "When there are bands like us pushing the extreme button now, there are going to be kids in the audience taking it to the next level. I think in five years extreme music is going to sound like a musical holocaust--and I can't wait." :

The Underground Deathfest with Cephalic Carnage, Internal Bleeding, Deeds of Flesh and more, at Foufounes Électriques on Friday, July 14, 5pm, $25