Band Details

From the Promoter

WINDHAND

For a band who traffic in measured, unhurried riffage, Richmond’s WINDHAND have moved awfully quickly over the last few years. Founded in 2009, the VA quintet have been making waves since the release of their 2010 practice space demo, a two-track CD that garnered the band comparisons to artists like Electric Wizard, The Devil’s Blood, and Black Sabbath. That auspicious start was further realized in March 2012 when the band released their self-titled debut, which quickly became an underground hit and sold out of multiple vinyl presses in a matter of months.

A year later, the band officially signed to Relapse Records. After a steady touring schedule, the band collaborated with Richmond brethren Cough on a split entitled Reflection of the Negative, which was released on Relapse in April 2013. Pitchfork deemed the split WINDHAND’s “best music to date,” and the record’s positive critical reception helped pave the way for WINDHAND to release the highly anticipated album Soma in September 2013. Stereogum, Spin, and the LA Weekly featured Soma prominently on their overall best-of lists. The album was heavily represented in countless metal publications including Revolver, Invisible Oranges, MetalSucks, and Metal Injection. Rolling Stone, NPR, and Pitchfork all took note of Soma as well; the former considered the album the third-best metal release of 2013.

Soma was no flash-in-the-pan internet phenomenon. In 2013 and 2014, the band embarked on a series of support and headlining tours across North America, Europe, and Australia, sharing the stage with the likes of Sleep, High on Fire, Dead Meadow and Kvelertak. In addition, WINDHAND appeared at major festivals including Roadburn, SXSW, Scion Rock Fest, Day of the Shred and Maryland Deathfest. WINDHAND also took the time in October 2014 to follow up Soma with a brief two-track Halloween split alongside Swedish doomsters Salem’s Pot (released on Riding Easy Records). Noisey liked the record so much that they declared the band “must have definitely sold their souls for their new split.”

WINDHAND returned in 2015 with their third full-length, Grief's Infernal Flower, a multifaceted slab of thundering stoner doom that Noisey has called “doom metal's most anticipated album of the year.” Produced by Jack Endino (Nirvana, High On Fire, Soundgarden, etc), Grief's Infernal Flower is massive, heavy, and personal, a modern testament to the power of doom and stoner metal’s legacies. One sees the urgency the band have displayed over their career reflected in their music – long-canonized tropes are reimagined and reinvented, WINDHAND convey an irrepressible sense of motion even within the slowest of songs. Front woman Dorthia Cottrell firmly establishes herself as one of the best vocalists of the genre by perfectly balancing beauty with enormous power, and the twin-guitar attack of Garrett Morris and Asechiah Bogdan weaves together nine songs of perfect riffs and fuzzed-out bliss. That often-delicate splendor is all tempered by the colossal rhythmic mastery of bassist Parker Chandler and drummer Ryan Wolfe, whose lower-register expertise serves as the backbone of the new record. Though the first two WINDHAND albums were underground classics, Grief's Infernal Flower stands to see WINDHAND cementing themselves as one of the premier metal bands of our time.

SATAN'S SATYRS

Arriving from Herndon, Virginia in a psychic blizzard of garage-birthed fury and fuzz-crazed abandon, Satan's Satyrs stand proud as a malignant manifestation of all that's debauched and demented in heavy music. What's more, their incoming third album, 'Don't Deliver Us', beamed in from a metaphysical zone of over-amped '70s power trio action and exploitation-movie malice, may well be the most gory and glorious thing they've thus far wrenched into creation.

A new wild outpost in a freakrock lineage that extends from Edgar Broughton Band and Blue Cheer through Alice Cooper, Mountain and beyond, this is a significantly more stripped down, raw and intense listen than its predecessor 'Die Screaming'. "We wanted to recapture the primitive thrust of rock 'n' roll to our sound" asserts frontman Clayton Burgess, also of Electric Wizard, who indeed recently achieved the considerable feat of completing a Stateside sell-out tour performing double-duty in both bands. ”That was an absolutely exhilarating experience for us in Satyrs,” he enthuses. “It made us so much tighter as musicians and bandmates. The rush of playing in front of so many people, we live for that.”

Indeed, not only have Satan’s Satyrs recovered the heinous in-the-red overload that characterised their debut cult classic ‘Wild Beyond Belief’, yet whilst that album was made entirely by Burgess himself, ‘Don’t Deliver Us’ boasts an electrifying band chemistry palpable throughout gonzo sonic debacles like the alarmingly catchy garage-stomper ‘(Won’t You Be My) Gravedancer’ and the Stoogian and stygian ‘Full Moon And Empty Veins’, which Clayton dubs a tongue-in-cheek ‘Dracula’s love song’. "When the three of us get together, it's loud and raw, no matter what we're playing.” he notes “If the last album was of the mind, this is of the body. These new tracks go for the throat, for the gut, and other areas".

The cerebral realm that Satan’s Satyrs dwell in remains to the onlooker one of late-night exploitation and biker flicks, overflowing ashtrays and unfettered debauchery in all its forms. Yet Clayton, he whose personal aesthetic has dominated this band since its inception and whose grand guignol vocals morph the shamanic caw of Ozzy, the sneer of Alice and the heroically unfashionable influence of Stray’s Steve Gadd into one unholy whole, remains loath to place this untamed beast anywhere too specific just yet.

“I don't want gimmicks to weigh this band down.” he emphasises “All I can say is that I've watched Tony Iommi rip into the opening chords of ‘War Pigs’ from 30 feet away. I've had Bobby Liebling look me straight in the eyes as he sang ‘All Your Sins’. I've had my hair stand on end and felt strange frissons from the music which means so much to me. My ultimate desire is to reach people in the same way with our music. That's what I strive for”

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