Slaughter To Prevail Decimate The Windy City

Chicago's legendary Aragon Ballroom opened its doors exactly a century ago in 1926. Over that time, the massive brick structure has been all kinds of joints holding all kinds of events. After big band music and public dancing died down, it took turns as a roller rink, a radio broadcasting station, a boxing venue, and even a disco.

With its cavernous interior, massive ceilings and 7+-foot tall stage, over the years the Aragon has become a pillar of the Chicago heavy metal scene, with any band big enough to draw about 4K fans all ready to headbutt each other at the top of the headlining list.

I don't give you this Windy City history lesson for no reason. I wanted to set the context that this old building has seen a lot, musically and historically. It's seen fires, it's seen tornadoes, it's seen blizzards. It's seen bands so loud and brutal it can make the back of your molars buzz.

There's no possible way any show that venue has ever hosted was louder than this one was. Yes, there's no way of me possibly being able to prove that without the help of movie time travel, but I refuse to believe that human beings are capable of creating music louder and more punishing than what Slaughter To Prevail brought to town, certainly helped in no small amount by bringing along Atilla and Whitechapel on the undercard.

As far as metal acts go, you might think that Atilla might be the odd man out on the bill. From a 'do they scream and make your body hurt with their music?" standpoint, they pass with flying colors. But they're also way more of a 'party bro' metal band than one that you'll catch throwing out guttural screams about Satan. An odd take for a deathcore band to take, and one that's caught the band a certain amount of heat for 'real metalheads' that care about such things.

The good news for Atilla is that all it takes is one song to absolutely put any concerns about their legitimacy to rest. Frontman Chris Fronzak, masked like he was about to rob my house in 1998, effortlessly launched the band into 'CONCRETE THRONE', giving the capacity crowd absolutely no warm-up or warning for what their bodies were about to go through over the next 8 songs. The band immediately launched into 'Moshpit', but the crowd didn't need any kind of hint to open that kind of craziness up. The energy was already high throughout the set, but 'Middle Fingers Up' sent the place into a frenzy for reasons I probably don't have to explain. It's fun enough to rage and throw up the bird under the best of circumstances. Considering the state of the world right now, doing it as enthusiastically as possible with 4,000 other screaming fans and the loudest PA system in the city at your back? You can't get better therapy than that.

Maybe a little bit of bro energy is what we need right now in metal. A little positivity. It certainly worked as a great party starter for the insanity that was still to come.

If Atilla's set was a party, Whitechapel's set was more like a ritual from the Church of Screaming and Naming Songs After Terrifying Things and Liquifying Everyone's Brains with Pure Demonic Metal.

Was I a little terrified thinking about what they could possibly be summoning onstage (or even birthed out of the middle of the pit)? Yes.

Was I in a hurry to leave before finding out? Hell no.

Veterans of the deathcore scene for almost two decades, Knoxville's Atilla has been one of the most consistent acts out there, churning out brutal live shows and terrifyingly dark albums with a regularity most bands never reach (only once has the band gone as many as four years between albums). Expanding their audience without compromising their dark and absolutely twisted reputation is no small feat, and the capacity crowd at the Aragon found out exactly how a band can pull that off.

Kicking things off with 'Prisoner 666' off last year's Hymns in Dissonance, lead singer Phil Bozeman used the next thirteen songs to absolutely blow the minds of every single person with his voice. I'm only slightly exaggerating. Dude can do things vocally that would likely paralyze me in the neck for a month if I even thought about trying. Guttural animal growls? Check. High-pitched squeals? On demand. Being able to control pitch on screaming?? Come one, dude. Leave some for the rest of the genre!

At his back was the absolute sludge and fury you would expect from a band that plays songs called things like 'A Visceral Retch' and 'Mammoth God' and 'The Somatic Defilement', sounds that made the century old building rethink its own structural integrity. Hardcore (no pun intended) fans were treated at the end of the set, with the closing sequence of 'The Somatic Defilement'/'Devirgination Studies'/'Prostatic Fluid Asphyxiation', the second through fourth tracks of their 2007 debut album.

There's a certain type of concert that you show up to already knowing, on some level, that you're going to leave with fewer functioning vertebrae than you arrived with. The shows where you see the lineup and immediately start doing mental inventory on whether you've been stretching enough. Where you text your chiropractor ahead of time just to give them a heads up (I'm only kidding...I'm nowhere near fancy enough to have a chiropractor. Or fully functioning vertebrae at my age).

As if I haven't hinted at it enough already, Monday night's Slaughter To Prevail show was one of those concerts.

The Russian deathcore juggernaut has been on a slow, relentless rise for years now, building a reputation as one of the most sonically punishing live acts from the entire state of Florida, which is definitely saying something (that state has to be the capital of metal which is no wonder why all the band logos look like they were discovered in swamps). And if there was any doubt about whether that reputation was earned, the answer came approximately fifteen seconds into opener "Bonebreaker," when the room collectively decided that their spines were optional for the evening.

What makes Slaughter To Prevail particularly interesting as a live act (and what sometimes gets lost in conversations about the band with so much focus on the masks and tattoos and bear wrestling) is just how much structure there is holding together the chaos. Frontman Alex Terrible is the obvious focal point, a mountain of a human being who somehow manages to sound even more inhuman in person than he does on record. His gutturals and just general terrifying-ness (yes that's a word now) are the stuff of legend at this point, and he deploys them with a precision that makes the whole thing feel less like screaming and more like operating very heavy machinery. Terrifyingly heavy machinery. Machinery they won't let you touch until you're at least 5 years on the job at the factory where all they do is manufacture drop-D riffs that cause seismic activity.

The setlist itself was a smart one. 'Banditos' and 'Russian Grizzly in America' kept the early momentum chugging along without giving the mob a moment to breathe, while "Viking" hit the kind of mid-set peak that makes you forget what year it is and remember that you are, in fact, currently losing your mind. For just a few minutes as the WALL OF DEATH came together, maybe we were all in Valhalla wearing horned helmets and smashed on mead. By the time "Bratva" came crashing through, the floor of the Aragon had fully evolved from a mosh pit into what can only be described as a regional weather event. It was hot, it was sweaty, it was...probably 96% male...but it was AWESOME. It was METAL.

And yet, mixed into all the darkness and brutality, Alex Terrible did stop and thank the crowd for coming out. In a great contrast to the mood of the rest of the evening, taking a moment to acknowledge that every ticket sold and every song streamed helps him put food on the table for his family gave a fantastic bit if humanity to the inhuman, even if just long enough to catch your breath and knock the person next to you's teeth out in about 5 minutes.

Slaughter To Prevail are not a band you put on in the background. They are a band that demands your full attention, your full body, and apparently all of the bones in your body. Chicago obliged on all counts Monday night, and it was an absolute pleasure to watch the city get taken apart.

Slaughter To Prevail's North American Tour continues through May. Tickets and dates can be found here.