A Veteran Doom Act and a Local Thrash Bill, Same Week
Castle just put out the best reviewed record of their seventeen-year career, and on October 29th they’re playing it in a 300 cap room in Hollywood. Four nights earlier, on October 25th, Sinister Sounds packs five bands into 1720 for a bill called Thrashoween. A JUNO-nominated doom act and a scrappy local thrash night, six days apart. That’s the pairing worth paying attention to this week.
1720 is one of the four rooms this beat gets built around, alongside First Street Pool, The Moroccan Lounge, and Teragram. That’s the LA underground metal corridor, the geography nobody else bothers mapping. Knucklehead Hollywood isn’t one of those four rooms. It’s a different neighborhood and a different booking circuit, and it deserves its own credit rather than getting folded into the corridor because it’s convenient. What it shares with the corridor isn’t geography, it’s instinct: small room, real booking, bands that matter to the people actually paying attention.
Thrashoween’s bill leans on two acts actually building something. VBN formed in LA in 2019 on a stated mission to revive a scene they think has gone soft, and they’ve opened for Soulfly, Doyle, and Exmortus while cutting the Plagued Society EP and the full length To Live and Die in LA. Mortalis signed to Metal Assault Records in 2022 off their debut From The Cryogenics, four guys who, by their own account, spent five years admiring that label before it finally happened. Massecutor, Samodiva, and Wasted HXC round out the bill. This isn’t a package tour passing through. It’s a promoter, Sinister Sounds, building a night out of bands who actually live here.
Castle is a different animal entirely. Seventeen years in, and Carrie Chains is their seventh album, a Jesse Gander production that Dead Rhetoric just handed a 9.5. That’s not hometown grade inflation, that’s a band still getting better. In Witch Order won Metal Hammer Norway’s Album of the Year in 2011. Blacklands picked up a JUNO nomination two years later. They’ve played Roadburn, multiple Desertfest bills, toured with The Sword, Conan, and Pentagram, and logged over 600 shows doing it. A band with that resume playing a 300 cap room in Hollywood should be the headline, not a footnote.
I’m not going to either of these, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t know either lineup before this week. That’s exactly the point. Two real shows, six days apart, and neither one needed a national outlet to happen. Somebody’s paying attention. This week, it’s us.
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