Holly Hunt Play Fort Lauderdale; Five Essential Ingredients for Effective Stoner Metal (Video)

Ronnie Rivera

See also Drunken Slashpine interview with goofy black-metal questions

Metal music wears its love of extremity on its sleeve. But don't be fooled. There is no one right way to rock. For example, the drunks in Slashpine play black metal, which means they play as fast as they can. On the other end of the spectrum lie Beatriz Monteavaro and Gavin Perry, AKA Holly Hunt, a drum-and-guitar duo that embraces the slow, syrupy crawl of the epic, atmospheric genre known the world over as stoner metal.

The term itself is a little ambiguous and can refer to a multitude of approaches and techniques. As connoisseurs of brutality, Monteavaro and Perry are not content to simply re-create the formulas set before them but instead construct an impressively personalized sampling of their genre's history.

To break down stoner metal and offer a better idea of what to expect from this Saturday's Green Room showcase, here is a list of five essential ingredients that, mixed together, make something definitely edible in an auditory way: Holly Hunt.



The band: Black Sabbath
The ingredient: Evil riffage
Ozzy and Iommi are the Adam and Eve of weed metal. Although the '60s (Zeppellin, Hendrix, Deep Purple, etc.) had set rock 'n' roll on the path toward total riff annihilation, rock music had been a source of unease for popular culture since it came into vogue with Elvis' salaciously gyrating groin and the mod-era Beatles' shaggy mop tops.

But Black Sabbath didn't concern itself with innuendo or the forefront of youth fashion. Instead, it loaded up the gravity bong, took a massive hit while staring into the void, and then screamed "Hail Satan!" while exhailing a mighty jet stream of smoke.



The band: The Melvins
The ingredient: Riff worship
A decade after "Iron Man" was the definitive anthem for greasy potheads, the Melvins brought a few buckets' worth of said grease to their underground nuclear weed-riff laboratory bunker and turned it into sludge. That is to say, the Melvins dared to divorce the riff from rock music that it may be placed upon an idolatrous pedal to be worshiped as a deity unto itself.

Sabbath may have imbued rock 'n' roll tone with a delicious deep-fried haze, but the Melvins made it crunchy.