Poor Coliseum. They gave a perfectly serviceable show: high energy, tight, loud as hell. The sound emanating from their Coliseum brand amps (the band’s namesake) was dutifully crusty, the EQ pushed to red. Their songs were short and catchy, in a post-hardcore-meets-Motörhead kind of way. But this Louisville, KY band, with their monotonous, genre-bound songs that meld into each other two minutes at a time like a formulaic beat poetry reading, had nothing on the bookends surrounding their set—bipolar acts who both sit at the very forefront of heavy music today.

Minsk, Coliseum, Baroness. Three mismatched Relapse Records acts who occupy distinct spheres of heavy music, they span a wide spectrum from dirge-like drones to hoarsely delivered shouts to harmonized twin guitar solos.

Chicago’s Minsk led the night, playing to a nearly empty room that filled up with a gradualness that matched their glacially paced music. Their music defies traditional song structure; the two leads created a dense swirl of darkly opaque atmosphere between a mini-moog stack, a severely down-tuned guitar and dual vocals that alternated between baritone melody and gruff, uninhibited shouting. You could see the veins popping out from keyboardist Timothy Meade’s neck with every ripping scream.

The use of extreme dynamics was refreshing: for every chugging power chord there were two intricate passages of delicately fingerpicked arpeggios; for every daub of Neurosis a stroke of Pink Floyd. Underneath it all, the rumbling bass riffs and driving tribal beats propelled otherwise formless songs with a strange urgency. Melodic but without a need for hooks, Minsk come close to sounding like the scorching of cities. By the end of the set, there was nowhere to stand. The barflies had come up from below, beckoned by the band’s otherworldly call.

Guitarist/vocalist Chris Bennett tells me a new album is in the works for a mid-2009 release. Fans of heaviness, take note.

Rounding out the rear as headliners, Baroness have developed quite a following for a band with only one award-winning full-length and three earlier EPs on their resume. Hailing from Savannah, GA, they look like a bunch of hairy young woodsmen, all gangly posture and wildly unkempt facial hair. Their sound is inimitable, a crazy blend of southern blues, shameless prog-worthy virtuosity, hushed shoegazey glimmer and flat-out stoner doom that’s every bit as heavy as High on Fire and tight as Mastodon. They can sing in major thirds so high you’d swear they were a schoolgirl choir or growl low enough to make your bowels move.

How do these guys keep going song after breakneck song, each with seemingly endless passages of complexly harmonized counterpoint and shifting time signatures? Watching them was exhausting, even without touching the mosh pit.

“My voice just gave out,” singer/guitarist/album artist John Baizley admitted between songs toward the end of the marathon set, and I could identify: my own voice was shot just from cheering them on.

So it’s easy to forgive Coliseum for getting a bit lost in between their stagemates. Maybe the best thing that can be said about them is that they almost kept up, simply by not letting up. As one of their fans says on last.fm, “JUST PUT GODDAMAGE INTO THE CAR STEREO AND GET RIPPING DOWN THE HIGHWAY, RAM A FUCKING PIG AND HEADBANG UNTIL YOUR SKULL FALLS OFF.” Lacking a car, a pig and the desire to lose my skull, maybe I just didn’t get to experience them as they’re meant to be experienced.

Tracks to try: Minsk – “White Wings” (The Ritual Fires of Abandonment), Coliseum – “ HYPERLINK “Defeater” (No Salvation), Baroness – “Rays on Pinion” (The Red Album)

Photo by Derrick Koo