Festivals Out Your Ass!, Pt. 4: It’s Circle Pit Time, Y’all

Hey, don’t laugh — I may be a big over-thirty dork with a kid & house & all that crap, but I, too, have known the wonders of the pit. I’ve gotten stomped into the mud (Fishbone @ Lollapalooza), come close to getting my jaw broken by arm-swinging gorillas (Helmet in San Antonio; that show was also the start of my tinnitus, dammit…), and been miraculously cured after Marky(?) Ramone spat on me (Ramones @ the I-Ball).

I’m no hardcore devotee, mind you — as with any type of music, I think about 90% of it is crap and only 10% genius, and I seem to be hearing more of the former than the latter lately. For a lot of modern hc, I tend to just shrug and say “eh.” That said, stuff like this makes me very, very happy:

Sat., October 20 — Fallcore Fest @ The Meridian
I honestly don’t know much about the history of this particular festival; it just seemed like it magically appeared one year, and against all odds, the folks running the show just soldiered on and on. Hardcore-heavy festivals like this don’t seem to do real well in Houston, although I dunno why, given the size of the hardcore scene — I’ve seen several “annual” festivals like Fallcore just die out after a year or two of existence, while this one’s now on it’s seventh year. Hoo-ah. The folks over at Hate Tank deserve a lot of thanks, I think, for keeping this one alive & promoting the shit out of it…

In case you haven’t already guessed, Fallcore’s a ridiculously heavy lineup of local (mostly?) hardcore-ish bands; some are more on the trad-hc end of things, some are more metalcore, some are basically screamo bands, and some are just, well, metal (Iron Age, for one; I swear they sound like late-’80s thrash to me). There’s a ton of great, great people playing, including oh-my-God-they’ll-never-die legends Will to Live (ex-Refuse to Fall, for those who remember such things), The Jonbenet, Die Young, I Am Wolf, Your Mistake (it’s their last show, reportedly, along with Ten Crowns last show), and even Tanari, who I could’ve sworn were dead & buried. Expect to get your head and eardrums pummeled.

At any rate, the whole deal takes place at The Meridian this time out, taking up both their main “Blue Room” stage and the smaller “Red Room” side stage you have to walk past to get to the big one. Tickets are $15, which may sound steep but is actually pretty good considering the lineup (see below), and the show starts at 2PM (doors at 1PM) and runs ’til midnight or so. Oh, and Freebirds will be on hand to serve big-ass burritos (“wraps,” to you citified folk) to mean-looking, tattooed, bloody, and very hungry hardcore kids. (Not for free, sadly; there’s a menu w/prices on the Fallcore Website.)

Interestingly, the Fallcore organizers seem to be doing the one thing I really liked about the Warped Tour in the past, which is that they’re running bands back-to-back on 2 stages with no annoying waits in-between. That way you finish watching, say, Will to Live in the Blue Room and then walk over to the Red Room just as Die Young are starting up. Damn good idea. You’d better run, though, ’cause it looks like the longest any band gets onstage is about 25 minutes. Yeowch…