Generation Magazine

By Ren LaForme

Between 60 and 100 people are standing inside the dimly lit Xtreme Wheels Skatepark. They watch adolescents on skateboards coast up half-pipes and ollie over rails as they attempt to recover from the thunderous band that just swaggered off the stage. Sweat beads up on dozens of foreheads and then rolls down to the floor, moistening thenow-dry mud that the concertgoers tracked in on their shoes. Anticipation swells. The stage is quiet—for now.

Six young men set up their gear and glide onto the stage; guitars, microphones and drumsticks in hand. One bends down and flicks a power switch on his all-tube Peavey amp. A light inside burns red. The drummer lifts his drumsticks high above his head and forcibly brings them down to meet the stretched Mylar on his snare and floor tom. Guitar picks meet strings, sending surges of electricity across magnified pickups, down twisted cables, through beat-up stomp boxes and into amplifiers that push out hundreds, if not thousands, of watts of sound through dozens of speakers. Dual singers emit a combination of roars and shrill screams. All hell breaks loose.

Your ears are suddenly assaulted—or, depending on who you speak to, glorified—with music that’s about as wicked as the skies above Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. But with an atomic bomb, that’s it, you’re gone. This is constant, sustained—more of a global thermonuclear war than just one measly eruption.

Meet Calamity from the Skies.

The band continues as the crowd fractures into two groups; the ruthless and the frightened. The frightened retreat to the sides of the building and the ruthless begin to mosh. They’re violent. Chaotic. They move without purpose.

Some choose to stand around the edges, focused on the band but pushing back when the moshers get too close. A cheery looking kid with sandy brown hair named Runk stands among these onlookers. Nobody can say for sure if Runk is his real name, or what his last name is, but that’s inconsequential at this point. One mosher flails a little too hard. A little too fast. He spins out of control and hits Runk directly in the face. Hard. Blood spurts from his nose and mouth. He spits out two teeth onto the stained floor. He waits until the band finishes about a half hour later and then he goes to the hospital, where the staff will attempt to mend his shattered nose and teeth.

In many ways, Runk’s plight exemplifies the stereotypes people have about the metal scene in Buffalo. But in a sea of physical aggression and anger, Runk is actually an exception to the rule.

“That was the worst one,” says Dave Mahoney, one of Calamity from the Skies’ two singers. “I’ve just heard of other people getting bruises, bumps, whatever, hit here and there.”

Many try to write off bands like Calamity from the Skies and their followers as typical angry teens, but in reality, they’re anything but. There’s more to these kids than stitches and screaming. Just a quick glimpse at Buffalo’s metal scene reveals a brotherhood, a philosophy, and most importantly, a group of young men and women who just want to have fun. Eat your heart out, Cyndi Lauper.

Luke Bright, guitarist for What Lies Beneath, says that metal is a diverse and interesting genre.

LUKE BRIGHT IS PISSED. So pissed, in fact, that he took the radio out of his battered Chevy Blazer to avoid hearing the “music” that kept coming out of it. “Radio rock, radio pop, radio rap—it’s all annoying. You need to get pissed,” he says.

Bright, 21, is a guitarist and songwriter for the local metal band What Lies Beneath, and a junior history major with a minor in classics at UB. And let’s just say that he doesn’t look like the kind of guy you’d want to butt heads with in a mosh pit. He’s built. He exudes the stoic confidence and sheer sturdiness that is usually only reserved for members of the Marine Corps. His closely cropped hair and substantial biceps certainly don’t dissuade this image.

And despite his physical characteristics and the incensed words that are now finding their way through his black and white tribal-patterned band T-shirt and out of his robust frame, Bright is not scary. He’s friendly, open—essentially the exact opposite of the typical angry metal-head stereotype. At first, that’s hard to see.

“We like really aggressive, violent music and we put on a smile when we play it,” he says, explaining the popularity of the scene and his bandmates’ motivation. “We kind of do—at shows—want to see violence. The more movement, the more jumping off shit and breaking stuff, the better.”

But as Bright continues to talk, it becomes obvious that he’s not the kind of guy you can pigeonhole into a formula. Like most people, he is complex, intricate. It’s easy to add one and one and get two, but Bright is more than that. He’s keenly aware of the stereotypes associated with his music, and he’s a little bit offended.

“I get it all the time; ‘you listen to that screamo shit. You worship the devil.’ Like no, I listen to Christian shit sometimes,” he says.

Bright says that some bands, like Knoxville, Tenn.-based Whitechapel, think that “the world is a piece of shit and everybody should die.” But metal is a diverse genre and it’s intriguing, he says, how some bands can combine Christianity and metal and create something like As I Lay Dying, a San Diego-based metalcore band who sing about life, struggles, relationships and other issues from a uniquely Christian perspective.

“Metal is fucking weird,” Bright says, explaining that a band named For Today has song titles named after bible verses, like Ezekiel and Isaiah. Buffalo’s own For the Horde, who play a self-described “no-genre, ridiculous music,” exemplify the diversity of metal, and they seem to be proud of it. Their Myspace page announces that they sound like “a new way to worship.”

“[Lead singer Tommy Beitner] sometimes takes a break in the middle of a set. He stops and says, ‘the only reason we’re all here is because of Jesus,’ ” Bright says. “Then he throws down and gets heavy.”

As the conversation progresses, Bright begins to reveal the hidden layers in the metal scene—the ones that many on the outside fail to see. For Bright and many others, metal isn’t about anger or violence. It’s not about broken noses, unlit venues, the devil or Jesus. For the same reason many people like radio music, ironically, Bright likes metal because it makes him want to move.

“I feel the music. [It] evokes some sort of feeling in me—it makes me want to bounce,” he says. “We just want you to come to the show and have fun.”

CALAMITY FROM THE SKIES are practicing at an ear-massacring volume. They’re in a second-floor room that’s been outfitted for metal, floor to ceiling. In many ways, it’s everything you would expect from this sort of band. The walls are adorned with axes, daggers and swords, held up by slight brass prongs. It seems like the rumble from the bass and constant chest-thumping pounds bellowing from the double bass drums could release them from their hold at any time—cascading them into someone’s back or foot or head.

There are drawings on the walls. Unfinished, dazzling drawings of fantasy creatures caught between concept and completion in gray pencil. There is a blanket hung on the ceiling above the drums, to dampen the sound and decrease echoing. And the speakers. There are speakers everywhere—lining one entire wall and taking up room on a few more. There’s an awkward corner, tucked back into the right side of the door, that’s completely filled with speakers. Large, black, daunting. You get the sense that earplugs are a necessity in this room.

The smell of an unmentioned kind of smoke sweetens the air, mollifies a few of the young men standing around and gives the whole place a communal feel. The house itself seems more like a hippie’s haven than a metal asylum. A kid with red eyes and unwashed hair leans flippantly against a door frame. “I’m just here, man,” he says, sounding more philosophical than he meant. A friendly black Labrador named Moe greets everyone who walks into the door, and two shih tzus with thick winter coats yap from a distance. The little black one growls, prompting laughter from visitors. The cream-colored one sniffs at the air. After a minute or two, they come closer and nuzzle legs and shoes with their indented noses. Their names are Fish and Slick and they’re the exact opposite of what you’d expect to see at Calamity’s headquarters.

The band is a diverse group of kids from across Niagara County. Bassist Topher Miller is easily the most intimidating, on first glance at least. His head is shaved bald. His earlobes have been stretched with large plugs. There’s a menacing-looking piercing cutting through his septum. But five minutes with Miller in a relaxed setting reveal a laid-back, very chill guy. Appearances mean nothing.

Doug Griffith drums with all the intensity and precision of a cheetah hurtling through the African savannah in pursuit of fresh prey, breaking landspeed records in the process. The only thing more impressive than the might at which he hits his Tama drums is the precision that he employs in the process. You can write off metal bands as deafening and callous as much as you want, but you can’t deny pure talent, and Griffith has plenty. He plays shirtless, building up layers of sweat and cooling off during the few seconds between songs. For Griffith, this isn’t a practice. This is it. This is life.

Jayke Jerla, the youngest of the band, stands tall among his bandmates. He’s slender. Quiet. Right now, his long, dark hair is tucked neatly into a black beanie. He’s relatively tame tonight, moving swiftly only to stomp a pedal or adjust a knob on his amp every now and then. But on stage, his long hair makes him a theatrical presence, flipping up and down over his shoulders and exemplifying the intensity of the music coming from the black Ibanez in his hands.

Kahlil Sarikey is trying to teach Jerla a complicated finger-tapping riff. Sarikey’s fingers move effortlessly over the mahogany fretboard on his black, seven-string Ibanez as he repeats the riff over and over. Flawless every time. Sarikey has a bit of an advantage over his companion; he’s been trained to play classical music. His training lends itself well to the metal genre. He’s precise, unrelenting. And he has the sickest afro in the entire scene.

Steve McIntosh is one of Calamity from the Skies' two lead singers.

Steve McIntosh does not have an afro. Steve McIntosh is intense. He is sitting on a speaker, leg resting on a piece of Griffith’s massive drum set. He’s a veritable dichotomy when he performs. He looks docile, almost Zen, when he’s not singing. But as soon as his jaw drops open, things change. His brows furrow, his eyes gaze straight ahead. It is at this moment that you realize that McIntosh is the most frightening member of Calamity from the Skies. If his face took this form in any other setting, you’d think he was about to pull a foot-long blade from his pants pockets to stab you in the jugular. And even though he’s screaming, he doesn’t look particularly strained. You get the sense that he’s capable of pushing things farther—so much farther—but you’re afraid to see it.

McIntosh’s co-singer, Dave Mahoney, is… no one seems to know.

“Where is he?” someone asks between songs.

“Being gay,” another says. Everyone laughs. It stands out as a sunny moment between two hugely brutal songs. It turns out that Mahoney is at a friend’s house, helping to fix a wall. “Must be taking longer than they thought,” someone says. Then they spontaneously break into another sadistic song.

MAHONEY WALKS IN A few minutes later. He’s just in time. McIntosh was fatiguing from performing two singers’ jobs. Mahoney hands him a Burger King bag, and everyone else gets Arizona’s Arnold Palmer Half and Half iced tea. “Sorry it took so long,” he says with a shrug. “Got the job done though.” They explode into a song called “The Scarlet Hue” as McIntosh devours his burger and fries. This time, Mahoney performs both parts.

From a distance, Mahoney is the archetypical metal singer. He’s got the long, flowing hair—metal hair, he calls it. He’s got the scraggly beard coming down the sides of his face and meeting on his chin. He wears a dark band T-shirt, and his jeans are ripped. But take a look closer. His hair is light brown, almost blond. You get the feeling that, if it was shorter, he’d be the kind of guy that all the girls talked about in high school. He’d be the not-quite-nerd, not-quite-prom-king type of guy that everyone was friends with. Mahoney is, in fact, funny, well spoken and a genuinely nice guy. But right now he’s roaring like a pissed off gorilla, and he does not look friendly.

“The Scarlet Hue” is a slow-burner, at least compared to the songs they’ve played so far. It starts with an airy—yet pointed—guitar riff, backed up by machine gun drumming and a rumbling bass. The band quickly moves in sync to an uphill battle against some unknown combatant. Mahoney comes in, screaming high, then low, and soon the band unleashes its fury like they’re battling to save humanity against the forces of hell on the end of days. McIntosh finishes his BK and the band is throwing in everything they’ve got, for 4 minutes and 15 seconds, until they break down into a well-orchestrated ending. “That was fucking awesome,” someone says. Everyone agrees.

WATCHING CALAMITY PLAY OUTSIDE of a show, it’s easy to see that they’re not in it because they’re a bunch of angsty teens. For one, these guys are in their 20s. And honestly, they’re not really all that angry.

“Some people like to stay in their comfort zone, but when you get into extreme metal and stuff, it’s just a visceral experience,” Mahoney says. “And some people like to mosh. It’s an exertion of anger in a positive environment. It’s not necessarily constructive, but it’s definitely not negative. It’s just having fun.”

It just so happens that these guys like to have fun by screaming, pushing, howling and moshing their way into oblivion. At face value, this might seem a little out of the ordinary. Maybe even unlawful. But Mahoney sees it as just another masculine thing—no different from playing a game of tackle football in the backyard.

“There’s a lot of underlying understandings going on. It’s like this code—not really a code of conduct—but it’s a respect thing. Everyone just does what they do and maybe someone accidently gets hit sometimes … it’s like a masculine appreciation, like playing sports. You get bashed by your buddy, it’s no big deal, it happens sometimes.”

Sure, kids like Runk get hurt sometimes. Luke Bright says he’s been hit too—one injury sustained at a show meant he had to get 15 stitches. But for this scene, that’s the name of the game. “No one left in an ambulance,” Griffith says. “No cops ever showed up at our shows or anything like that.”

Athletes get hurt on a weekly basis—they face life-changing disfigurements. What does it really matter if one or two kids get a scratch or two here and there? “If they’re friends it’s like, ‘aww dude you got me.’ These things happen,” Mahoney says.

Dave Mahoney, Calamity's other lead singer, likens the metal scene to a sporting event.

IT BECOMES CLEAR THAT there is an entire fraternity built around this Spartan appreciation for fun.

“It’s kind of like a brotherhood thing,” Mahoney says. “Of course, it’s not just guys, there’s all sorts of girls all over the whole thing. Hell, I’d say it’s 50-50.”

Bright and Mahoney agree; there exists a core of bands—a core of closely-knit friends—at the nucleus of the scene. Calamity from the Skies. What Lies Beneath. For the Horde. Amongst the Ruin. Construct. They formed around the same time, or they’ve been friends forever, or they’ve played together a couple of times—how they met is inconsequential. What matters is that they draw crowds. Big ones.

“We’re all just dudes that want to have fun,” Bright says. “I can’t name a dude who I don’t like. We all just want to play music and have fun doing it.”

The bands team up to create chaos in venues all over the area, from Xtreme Wheels to Club Diablo, from Amvets Post 13 to Penny Arcade in Rochester. Some gigs require the bands to sell tickets and some of the bands resent that. Calamity’s members refuse to sell tickets. Bright doesn’t like to sell tickets, either. That’s why he—like many others in the scene—prefers to play at the Hyde Park Pavilion in Niagara Falls.

“It feels like a hangout,” Bright says. “We know everyone there. We all just sit in a room and chill. It’s more like a family feel—you know everyone at the show. They’re not just there to see some big-name band that doesn’t give a shit about anyone.”

And despite the physical element, despite the fact that people leave with bruises and scrapes and, from time to time, bloodied appendages, the people seem genuinely to care about each other. “It’s usually a friendly environment; if somebody falls, somebody will pick them up,” Griffith says.

“You see someone get there late and he’s hugged individually by everyone going around,” Mahoney adds. “It’s a friendly thing; it’s a friendly environment.”

The people may be close, and the bands may be closer, but that doesn’t mean that they all sound the same. “Besides the whole screaming aspect, none of us sound remotely alike,” Bright says. Each band has its own sound, its own look, its own crowd and its own unique temperament. Bright says that one of the bands he saw put on onesie pajamas and hopped on stage with a techno intro. Others are more intense.

“Calamity from the Skies is the most violent band in Buffalo. You’d have to go to Rochester to find someone close,” Bright says.

Mahoney takes this as a compliment of the highest order.

“That’s really flattering and I love that anyone around here could ever say that. That’s really nice,” he says. “Our full intention in this band is to be as heavy but also technical as possible. We just want to be really raw. Really raw, really in your face. That’s how we have fun, man.”

THE METAL SCENE IN Buffalo is not underground. The metal scene in Buffalo scratches and screams and tears itself out of basements and bedrooms in search of the spotlight. Everyone’s in it for fun, of course, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have other ambitions. Mahoney lets his out early.

“We want to tour. We want to get our name out. We want people to know who we are,” he says. He catches himself. “Actually, we just want people to move around at shows. We just want people to have fun. Fun is our objective. This is our recreation.”

Griffith points out that they’re currently working on a full-length album. Eight songs and an intro. Griffith went to a music recording school in Ohio, and he’s amassed quite a bit of gear working at Guitar Center on Niagara Falls Blvd. He’s really giving it his all for this album. He previews a couple of the songs that are done, or at least close to it. There’s one called “Dogma.” Though it’s lacking Mahoney’s vocals, it is raw, closer to the live experience than the stuff on their EP, “Emissaries Of Jahbulon.”

“We have good feelings when we get this done,” Griffith says. “If we get it in the right people’s hands we could get signed, maybe.”

Mahoney reveals that they’ve been waiting for this. “We’ve had offers from smaller labels but we’re trying to aim kind of big. You know, start your way in the middle, work your way up if you can.”

Bright is more specific. Fame? No. Riches? No. He wants to travel.

“I just enjoy playing the guitar and writing music,” he says. “I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m never going to be Nickelback and see the whole world and make lots of money. I just want to tour and see the U.S. I want to do some cool shit that not everyone can say they did.”

Bright can say that he’s already accomplished some of that. What Lies Beneath packed up and traveled to Cleveland to open for Disturbed at the Warner Bros. Amphitheater in May. And their drummer missed his senior year of high school to tour with It Dies Today.

“If I can get out of doing real work for a year or two, hell yeah. That’s the real drive,” Bright says. “It’s like winning the lottery—it’s like the American dream. To be able to get by just doing what you love.”

IN SOME WAYS, THESE bands fit into every lame metal stereotype you’ve ever heard. They sing about gore, death, heaven, and hell. Upon closer inspection, the words seem a little too familiar. That’s because you’ve heard them before, you’ve seen them before—mostly on the silver screens of theaters across the nation.

“We have [a song] that’s about H.R. Giger’s ‘Alien’,” Mahoney says. “Sometimes we like to do the type of thing that other bands are doing where they’ll write from a serial killer perspective or something crazy like that. Just brutal, visceral, raw things.”

Mahoney’s favorite lyric from a Calamity song is “liberate tutemae ex inferis.” It means “save yourself from hell” and it’s from the space horror flick “Event Horizon.” Bright says a lot of What Lies Beneath’s songs are similar. “A lot of our songs are about nonsense violence or ex-girlfriends.”

Mahoney mentions briefly that some of his lyrics are political, and even calls Calamity a semi-political band. Based on his online profile, Mahoney is more than just a little political:

“The monetary system, capitalism, the ‘free-market’ economy and various other popular sociopolitical standards are simply methods of controlling the masses with fear, and I simply have no interest in any of it, place no faith in any of the aforementioned conventions, and whole-heartedly advocate the advancement of the human race in a drastically different direction than the way it is currently headed.”

The songs might appear to be pissed-off anthems of youth to some, but they’re actually anthems with a very pointed purpose.

LUKE BRIGHT IS TALKING about his favorite memories of mosh pits of yore.

“Last time, somebody got kicked in the balls—that was funny. It dropped him like a stack of bricks. It was beautiful.”

Metal will always be associated with violence. Whether that violence is something to fear or not is up to you. Bright doesn’t think it’s anything you should be afraid of, and he’s an expert on the serious kind of violence—he worked as a camp counselor for a local children’s organization for several years.

“I would hang out with kids and make sure they got their homework done and keep them from fighting,” he says. “Those 7-year-olds like to fight, man. Little Willy beat the shit out of Jamal. They’re 7 years old, swinging like Mike Tyson.”

Mahoney and the rest of Calamity from the Skies are going to keep doing what they do, whether it’s violent or not, unapologetically. “Artistic expression and recreation coupled together—that’s what we do for fun. Sometimes it’s a little angry.”

Just don’t judge them until you’ve experienced it yourself.

“Don’t think it’s some strange [group], and don’t do the whole gothic label thing. Don’t do any of that. Just go to a show and experience—see the look on everyone’s faces and why they’re enjoying themselves. Experience it for yourself. And if you’re not interested, you don’t have to go and you don’t have to listen to it.”

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