Decibel Philly Metal & Beer Fest 2025 Notes Part II: Day One, The Fillmore
by J †Johnson
Friday, April 4, 2025
Unholy Altar (Philadelphia¹)
The first band’s in corpse paint. They’re also femme presenting, and represent Philly (& Satan). Fuck. Yeah. Unholy Altar.
Sound system is opening-band low, which suits the Unholy Altar’s second-wave black metal aura. It’s like listening to a dubbed tape.
There’s so much shit for sale in the lobby. Go easy, metal pig.
Mother of Graves (Indianapolis)
Propeller headbanging bassist! We worry for Corey Clark’s neck but salute his service🤘🏼
We can hear how the songs are put together riff by riff. The pacing is super moody. It’s like a documentary where the soundtrack is the making of.
It’s bringing out the shaking claw gestures in the crowd. What is this move called? We suggest: The Basement Bedroom.²
We also have some Pit Dickheads to Avoid. Drunk already, backward hats, sinister gambol. We relocate.
Maul (North Dakota)
Singer Garrett Alvarado is bringing ’80s wrestling manager energy.
Inspired, the pit crew are doing pushups. Some of the sulfurous energy is dissipating.
Singer fumbles banter and brashly admits he’s nervous, kicks ass anyway.
During the closing number, Alvarado humbly asks that we present our motherfucking spirit balls.
Vastum (San Francisco)
Singer Daniel Butler is squirrelly as hell and secretly ripped. Shirt’s off, secret’s out!
Guitarist Leila Abdul-Rauf chimes in with a roaring verse & appears to be the low-key engine of the band.
Pit has shifted again, having passed through the stinking gates of drunk bros trying to mosh to a doom band during Mother of Graves set (thanks, Adam, for the assist on that description) to comic relief during Maul, with calisthenics and a headbang line, to roiling energy & crowd surfing. Stay tuned!
Darkest Hour (Washington, D.C.) Undoing Ruin (2005) set
We appreciate Mike Schleibaum posing with his flying-V guitar and lip synching in his Whitesnake sleeveless T while giving Alice Cooper face. He’s the most & making it work.
Dig singer John Henry’s black pearl snap up shirt. Formal wear for the special occasion in hell.
Pink bass! Aaron Deal has major sweetheart with a side of danger energy.
Pit vibe check: we made it to gleeful goofy cheer, running circles at recess. Flashbacks for the kids to when the album came out.³
A person in front of me is wearing an Undoing Ruin shirt. I’m wearing a Maul⁴ hoodie I bought from Alvarado (along with a tape of their ripping 2024 album, In the Jaws of Bereavement) after their set. Metal has a lot of heart. All that growling is self-protection.
Uh oh, we have air drumming in the crowd.
But we are also treated to topless drummer beefcake, courtesy of Travis Orbin.
The parts of my body that I landed on last night—ass, shoulder, back—are starting to hurt. Metal.
Ordered a (Yards) PPA then bonded with the bartender about how much the parking authority sucks. Bartender’s bf got a ticket for parking in front of his own garage and there’s actually a note on PPA’s site that they can cite you for it. ACAB includes PPA obvs.
As the crowd has grown, it’s gotten a lot less straight, white & male. Fuck racist purists who gatekeep metal. Let us all in.
Just saw a person in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre II shirt, featuring the Breakfast Club group pose. Be my friend!
Pig Destroyer (Alexandria)=immediate chaos.
House volume was at about 3 for the first set and is at 8 now.
Hide your pigs.
Pit has fully engaged homosocial mode. People are sweating and grappling.
And people sure do have different body temps. Dude next to me is wearing shorts. We get colder as we get older.
Most elaborate drum kit of the evening (so far). & Adam Jarvis is using it.
Forgot to mention there’s a bouncer in the runway between the crowd and the barriers, being catcher in the rye & all when people surf up to the front. Must be sore as hell tomorrow.
Pit hugs at the end of the set. Even one of the Dickheads to Avoid (either sobered or in a more friendly phase of intoxication) seems to be participating. Metal is love, y’all.
Now people are punch dancing again. The mosher in a burqa is unfazed.
Dismember (Stockholm)
We keep calling Dismember Disemboweled because we are a poser. They sound awesome and have not one but two flying-V guitars, plus they are playing a song called “Fleshless,” so we will never disrespect them again.
Also: silver fox wizard singer Matti Kärki! Plus a guitarist (Robert Sennebäck) with ass-length hair. And our first Swedish accents of the night.
We’re sober enough to really appreciate some inebriated slow-mo half-bent headbanging in the crowd. Metal is so metal.
Then a random cascading chorus of ooagh! in our vicinity.
Kärki is playing air guitar on the mic stand & Satan help us he’s pulling it off.
When two flying-V guitarists (Sennebäck & David Blomqvist) pull up next to each other to rock out it’s called a VVitch. We want you to picture them floating unlikely into the sky at the end of a mostly boring movie (except for the goat stuff & the evil toddlers), transcending their penises.
The PSA before (Don’t) “Skin Her Alive” (a true story!—“remember when you go home tonight be nice to your wives & girlfriends”) is… sweet?
Banter of the night: “It’s only fair if we make noise, you make noise.”
Baby moshpocket at the end of the night. So tender.
Check out Part I, and stay tuned for Part III, where we get our shit together only to lose it again🤘🏼🍺🖤👹
¹ Maybe it’s old-fashioned to list a band’s home city in an age when members might live in different places, but it’s good to remember these are people from places that somehow spawned this absurd racket. And of course lineups change and Encyclopaedia Metallum is only as accurate as any crowd-sourced database can be. But that’s what we’re using to confirm details, names, etc. Our intent is to help you find these bands and their music, and give credit where it’s due, and we hope you’ll read in that spirit, even as we would never deny you the pleasure of shaking your head when we get things wrong.
² Look, we’re doing it too.
³ Shut up, I’m old. Let us have our fun.
⁴ If you tell people you went to the Maul show they’re like, huh? Work that homonym🤘🏼