January 7, 2003

HEAR THAT AWFUL racket? That's the sound of headbangers having their minds expanded, courtesy of local noise/art/rawk impresario Mike Patton and his Ipecac Recordings imprint.

In the first of a pair of extraheavy year-end shows at the Great American Music Hall, Patton put together an Ipecac showcase that defied genre expectations and set up 2002 for a thunderous conclusion. After a year of burgeoning domestic fascism, global warming, and overseas warmongering, another dewy rendition of "Auld Lang Syne" just won't suffice. Patton has always had a somewhat controversial reputation, earning either starry-eyed devotion or curt dismissal from discriminating listeners of all stripes. But regardless of what you think of his career, there's no denying his remarkable vocal talents – and no limit to the admiration he deserves for pushing the envelope, regardless of the results.

Indeed, there may be no better time than now – and no better place than the Bay Area – to take those stylistic risks. The New Year's warm-up gig at the Great American seems to be part of a trend of way heavy, highly diverse showcases aimed at the thinking metalhead – as evidenced by Neurosis's Beyond the Pale series in November and the sold-out Isis-Dälek-Thrones show (which sandwiched experimental metal with noisy hip-hop) at Bottom of the Hill Oct. 10.

The Dec. 30 show was firmly in that tradition, with local heroes Patton, the Melvins, Kid 606, and Captured! By Robots performing alongside Japanese noise elder Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow) and Rhode Island's rising ambient/sludge metal combo Isis. The audience – featuring a healthy array of somber rockers, brainiac skinheads, odiferous dreadheads, ornamented goths, and T-shirt-clad nerds – was open to all of the evening's musical byways, though not everyone was won over all of the time. Some of the more stoic guitar purists merely stood at the sidelines through Kid 606's jackhammer beats, throbbing sampled drones, cut-up noise, and weird drops that quoted an OutKast song, Black Sabbath's "Sweetleaf," and Slayer's "Die by the Sword."

Although Isis delivered the most thrilling and gut-wrenching performance of the evening, the kids went absolutely apeshit for the Melvins. Messrs Osbourne, Crover, and Rutmanis dropped a payload of swaggering, sneering, low-hanging, bad-attitude cock rock that, within moments, had the audience moshing like lab animals jacked on too much galvanic current.

The crowd's limits were finally tested when Patton and Merzbow took the stage as the noise-improv duo Maldoror. Whether the collaboration succeeded is an entirely subjective matter. Noise aficionados groused that Merzbow should have played solo and that Patton's repertoire, regardless of how many delay pedals he had, was ultimately too limited to be anything but ballast. Rockers doubtlessly would have been more inspired by Patton's New Year's Eve set with the Dillinger Escape Plan the following night.

The fact that Patton and Merzbow did it at all merits much admiration, however, since artistic boundaries need to be trampled whenever possible – especially in these times of exclusive indie music cliques and media monopoly "narrowcasting." And Patton truly is capable of amazing vocal excess, howling, screeching, purring, yelping, roaring, giving intricate fellatio to his battery of microphones, digging deep into his twisted interior spaces and finding the most intense expressions of raw, negative human emotion.

He delivered all that and more over the crushing laptop artistry of Merzbow, an old-school barrage of ultrabass drone and clanging, clattering, totally undanceable sonics that massaged tired feet through the floorboards – such a departure from the Bay Area's laptop standard of tweaker/acidhead/music-school deconstructions.