NOLA Sludge Metal
It was no surprise that Southport Hall sold out again. Soilent Green may be a New Orleans-based band, but they perform so rarely that people went just to be able to say they saw them at least once. It's been over a decade since the last time they graced a local stage. And those who missed that last show so long ago surely weren't going to miss this one.
It was crazy to hear the absolute brick wall of sound emanating from Heraklion as there are only three of them. The death thrashers are growing rapidly in the local scene and hitting some impressive tours right now. I dug the classic looks of long, flowing hair that blurs around their faces when they headbang to the point of not really knowing what their faces look like.
Between bands, a lot of the hundreds of attendees fled to the porch for just a little fresh air, which gave the hardcore fans an opening to slide up and be right on the stage. Though Soilent Green's vocalist Ben Falgoust, well known as the frontman of Goatwhore, was wearing a typical black shirt while wading through the audience catching up with friends, he switched to his white t-shirt just before taking the stage. Always a black shirt for Goatwhore and seemingly always a white shirt for Soilent Green.
Drummer Tommy Buckley was hard to see behind the huge drum kit. It almost seemed to swallow him, but the beat started regardless of that as they launched into "It Was Just an Accident" off of Sewn Mouth Secrets without pageantry or fanfare. The huge sound eased between groovy moments that focused all attention on the four men on stage and how they related to each other and moments of heavy metal onslaught, which frenzied the moshers and those transfixed by the stage show.
Ben remarked on how even though Soilent has not played locally in a very long time that it felt "like a reunion" with lots of old faces in the crowd that mingled with a lot of younger people who were just getting into the band and lucky enough to catch them live. He called it "an unfathomable experience."
All five of the band's albums were represented in the setlist (the paper versions of which became hot commodities at the conclusion of the show) with most of the songs hailing from Sewn Mouth Secrets and Inevitable Collapse in the Presence of Conviction. However, "Numb Around the Heart" from Confrontation and "Later Days" from A Deleted Symphony for the Beaten Down had a huge reaction from the longest-time fans. "Falling From a 65 Story Building" started off to a mosh so fierce that the heat and humidity in the room rose immediately.
Through bangers like "All this Good Intention Wasted in the Wake of Apathy," "Slapf^ck," and "Antioxidant," the crowd swelled and swooned. Fans started moving their arms to match Tommy's, saying how impeccably well he was able to keep up with the constant changes in the songs. Brian was excited to be performing, which he hasn't done much since leaving his full-time gig with EyeHateGod to focus on his family in 2018, yet he was so concentrated on his guitar that the moments that he threw picks to people seemed odd. A few crowd surfers made it to the stage's edge, and Ben tried to pull them onto the stage. The few minor technical difficulties were not really noticeable until the band pointed them out to us, claiming that it wouldn't be a Soilent Green show without some.
The hour really flew by; I think we all got pretty lost in that show. While I would like to believe that it won't be another 10, 12, 15 years until the next New Orleans Soilent Green show, that may very well be the case. Ben did say that he can't imagine performing this hard at the age of 65. We must wait and see if that's the case.
