Under the Dice Fest 2024

 

On the last weekend of January, I was fortunate to be able to attend Under the Dice Fest 2024, a small festival in Massachusetts celebrating miniature-based tabletop wargaming. The festival was designed to appeal to those who shy away from the mainstream iterations of the miniature wargaming hobby, focusing on those who want play the games on their own terms, sometimes outside of the scope of the game rules as written, or those who want to play old games which are no longer supported by their publishers. It is highlighting those who are more concerned with telling a story with the miniatures they build than with creating something that would be optimal in terms of a game’s rule system. A punk rock approach to the miniature wargaming hobby, if you will. Beyond the opportunity to play games like Mordheim (a fantasy skirmish game released in 1999 by Games Workshop, set in the remnants of a city destroyed by a comet), a host of musical performances were planned for Saturday evening. The musical guests were from around the New England area and thoroughly rooted in the underground music scene.

Hole Dweller and Dungeon Synth

Despite my love of angry and abrasive music, I have started to become more and more interested in somber and reflective music as a respite from the harshness of my normal listening regime. This interest arose from my discovery of experimental drone metal bands like Locrian, who were mixing echoing drones with melodic post-rock guitar lines, all supplemented with crackling noise, guitar feedback, and sparse percussion. Locrian, along with other minimalistic drone bands like Earth, helped show me that there was a whole world of compelling music outside of more conventional, vocally-orientated music. This discovery had me scouring music blogs and websites for similar work and the forerunners of the style, and somewhere in those searches I learned about the genre of ambient music. 

Song Highlight: Dead Moon - Parchment Farm

The world of rock and roll music is filled with great bands that never quite got the recognition that they deserved. Portland, Oregon’s three-piece garage rock band Dead Moon is a prime example. Formed in 1987 by singer/guitarist Fred Cole, singer/bassist Kathleen "Toody" Cole (Fred Cole’s wife), and drummer Andrew Loomis, Dead Moon forged a fiercely independent path through the music industry for more than 20 years. Musically, they combined the jangly guitar sound of the 13th Floor Elevators, the downtrodden sadness of country, and the urgency of punk rock into a musical construct that always felt like it was on the verge of falling apart. 

Camping in Alaska - why can't i be snowing?

Anyone who has stuck around here long enough will know that I have a soft spot for Midwestern Emo, a subgenre of emo music that does not necessarily hail from the midwest. The genre revels more in the melodic guitar lines of indie rock than the unrestrained anger of the emo’s forefathers in the hardcore punk scene. YouTube’s algorithms have done a great job of helping me find Midwestern Emo, with the band Camping in Alaska being one of the highlights. 

Song Highlight: The National - Smoke Detector

“Music for people on the verge of a midlife crisis” is how I would describe the music of The National, the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Cincinnati rock band. They are not a band portraying the wistfulness of youth and young romances, rather they plumb the depths of adult life from unfulfilling jobs to stagnant relationships. They write songs about the banalities of a normal life, something that not many bands succeed in writing compelling songs about, or even try to do, for that matter. 

Spanish Love Songs - Bellyache

Anger and sadness are the emotional states that I am most drawn to in music. But of these two, if I was forced to pick a favorite, I would have to choose sadness. It is an emotion that we are all forced to grapple with during our lifetimes, so it is something that everyone can resonate with in some capacity.  Maybe it is the stage of my life that I am in, or my music snobbery, but happy music does not sound genuine to me. Fortunately, there is no shortage of sad music. The Los Angeles, California-based pop punk band Spanish Love Songs has been an ample supplier of sad music since I discovered them in 2018, shortly before the release of their second album, Schmaltz. Any devotee of melodic punk music will liken their sound to that of the early Menzingers' releases, back when the Menzingers still had some gruffness to them, and dwelt in unhappy places. 

Song Highlight: Left Lane Cruiser - Overtaken

As I had mentioned in a post about Junior Kimbrough, I did not grow up listening to the blues. When I considered the blues, my mind sprang to middling and unexciting Eric Clapton songs. My true love was guitar-driven rock and roll music, and while I intellectually knew that rock and roll came from the blues, nothing that I had heard really sold me on that notion (other than maybe Led Zeppelin's cover of "When the Levee Breaks”). I have come to see the error of my ways, and it was from hearing bands like Left Lane Cruiser, an electrifying two piece blues rock band from Fort Wayne, Indiana. The band consists of Freddie “Joe” Evans IV on slide guitar and vocals and Brenn Beck on percussion (ranging from the traditional drum kit to a washboard). Left Lane Cruiser takes the hypnotic groove of the North Mississippi hill country blues, like the aforementioned Junior Kimbrough, and injects it with the frenetic energy of punk rock. Joe’s vocal style is a gruff and unrefined bark that sounds like it was raised on a little too much Jim Beam and Miller Lite, which is appropriate given his description of the music as “dirty drinkin’ blues”.