Take a Trip to the Darkside

It's the middle of April, not exactly the time of year one associates with black metal. Spring rains are falling, I'm wearing sunglasses because of the actual sun and not the glare from the snow, and finally tree branches cease to look like bony fingers and are now studded with green shoots, and in some cases, blossoms.

Life is springing up all around (pun intended), and the beauties of life aren't readily associated with Brooklyn bands Anchorites and Drudgery, playing this Friday at the Hexagon.

If you wanna whet your appetite for Maryland Death Fest, the three-day death/black/sludge/doom/add your sub genre synonym here/metal festival taking place May 26-29 right here in Baltimore, Friday night at Hexagon is for you.

Personally, three days of any one kind of music is too much for me, but the Maryland Death Fest attracts acts and fans from all over the globe, and there are many acts worth seeing even for the casual fan. If anyone knows how to have fun, it's metal heads from Germany—real Hessians, if you will.

However, there are three days to fill and Death Fest isn't really for the casual fan, so if you're looking for some bands to check out to see just exactly where you fall on this complex scale of metal fans, look no further than the Hexagon Friday.

You will find your typical black metal fare, fourfold. Long intros with screeching feedback plunging into dense slow riffs, heavy-handed bass lines, tortured vocals, leading into 10 to 15 minute songs. If you're lucky, you'll get panda painted faces in homage to Lords of Chaos, hopefully stopping short of church burning and ritualistic murder. But who knows with these crazy kids?

If you have a hard time embracing black/death/doom metal outside of a Rob Zombie movie or haunted house of your nightmares setting, trip (literally and figuratively) on over to Ottobar Friday night for a psilocybin-soaked evening with the Acid Mother's Temple, the premiere Japanese psych rock band.

Now I know what you're thinking, what about all of those other Japanese psych rock bands? Forget em, you don't need em.

Founded in 1995 by Kawabata Makoto, the Acid Mother's Temple (and Soul Collective) has had many, many, many different incarnations and members over the years, it's best not to clutter your mind trying to keep track. All you need to know is Makoto fuses American psych, German progressive krautrock, and Stockhausen influenced electro into his own special blend of what he calls “extreme trip music.”

Lately Makoto has been incorporating more jazz sounds in with the latest group of musicians he's touring with, The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. Free form improv is also a big part of the Temple, and with a decidedly more spiritual side than what you'd encounter from your average psych band.

Acid Mother's Temple is anything but average, working within the framework of psych in the realm of experimentalism, using the guitar as his preferred method of communication. Great, I listen to a few songs and now I sound like someone who should've been with Ken Kesey on that bus trip.

It's hard for me to tell you what to expect from an Acid Mother's Temple show—they are almost completely improvised and a 10-minute studio song could easily turn into an hour-long odyssey with a long-haired Japanese gypsy that probably took the brown acid despite all of Wavy Gravy's warnings.

If you are a fan of anything outside the realm of structured rock—prog rock, jazz, drawn out riffs that melt into another, sounds that you are genuinely surprised to hear emanate from a guitar, suspending belief and surrendering to somethin a little trippy—this is for you.

Here's to hoping the fans from the Hexagon park next to someone coming from the Ottobar and everyone expands their musical horizons this weekend. There are plenty of other ways, too ...

• Sunday at The Wind Up Space: Climate For Peace, A Benefit for Japan featuring New Age Music for Cats and We Used to be Family. Kawabata says thank you!

• Tuesday at Golden West: Hunx & His Punx, Shannon and the Clams, Personal and the Pizzas, Barreracudas. Any band named after my favorite dish at Pizza Hut deserves a listen. And Hunx and His Punx have a tie to one of my all time favorites, Richard Hell & the Voidoids. Win/Win.