Local noise-rock band Den started with a fight. In summer 2010 vocalist Adam Harris, drummer Ian Piirtola, and bassist Ray Keenan played in a spastic hardcore four-piece called Neurons with guitarist Cole Mason. Creative differences between Mason and the rest of the group had started to bleed over into interpersonal tension, and on July 31, while they were driving to play a DIY show on the north side, something finally snapped.
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“We were just getting weirder,” Piirtola says. And Den are pretty strange, at least for a posthardcore band—and not just because they don’t have a guitarist. “Grindstone,” the first track on Bronze Fog—their debut full-length, which came out in March 2011 on Harris’s Retrograde Tapes label—opens with ominous, rattling drum fills and slow strokes of buzzing distortion, then segues suddenly into a crushing, propulsive roar filled with lunging electronic squeals, clashing cymbals, booming snare, sludgy bass, and strained howls fighting through a cloak of feedback. Other songs traffic in foggy atmosphere: the creepy “Cement Bed” sometimes sounds so loose and airy it’s as though the band recorded it with microphones a mile away. There’s even a muddied cover of Black Sabbath’s “Symptom of the Universe.”
Some of Den’s gear is just as cruddy as the band’s music sometimes sounds. One of those four pedals Keenan found in a Dumpster, and Harris persists in singing into a microphone rescued from a sewer drain in the basement of a house where he and Piirtola used to practice, record, and host DIY concerts. The mike went missing after local hardcore group Duress played a farewell show in August 2010, and Den found it a couple months later; someone had obviously wedged into the drain on purpose. “It was just covered in sludge and nasty shit,” Harris says. “It was all dented up and rusted with poop and whatever else. We call it the poop mike. I still put my lips on it and it still works.”
Folks outside the hardcore scene have been more welcoming; BLVD Records cofounder Melissa Geils took an interest in Den from the start, and after she booked them at Late Bar in July she was won over. “They played the show and blew my mind—and also the minds of my label partners, Eric [Marsh] and Alex [Foucre-Stimes],” Geils says. “That night, all three of us were pretty much like, ‘Yup, we need to do a record for these guys.’” Though Den are self-releasing Electric Eyes, soon they’ll begin work on a full-length follow-up for BLVD—for which they plan to use an outside engineer for the first time, instead of recording themselves in their practice space.
Fri 11/30, 9 PM, Burlington Bar, $7 requested donation.
