Our band of hooded maniacs was asked to play the first ever Infest Edmonton Metal Festival over Labor Day weekend. We would all have the day off, so why not labor over our love of music? We headed out to check out the scene in the Energy Province.
We got some free drinks and booze courtesy of Sean’s fancy ass credit card that got us into the airport lounge. That was good because we’d just spend almost $600 on luggage fees. Even though we whittled it down to just two Enki double-guitar cases for all 3 stringers, all those monster costumes and merch add up. And West Jet was in no mood to cut as a deal. I always tell my dad our guarantees so we look like big shots, but truth is, all that money gets eaten real quick with expenses for a dumb gimmick band like ours.
Unlike driving into Canada, flying in is a snap. No one quizzes you relentlessly about drugs, no one tries to trick you with questions, no one asks about how merch you have; basically, no one is a dick. No, that’s for the American side when you fly back.
I got to see my friend Pserah Be while up there. She’d moved to Edmonton recently along with a whole other host of people formerly from Vancouver. The housing crisis is real. But that seems to be changing the scene in Edmonton for the better. Far from being the sleepy lil capitol of Alberta, it’s becoming the Austin, Texas of Canada (from a long time ago… not the Austin, Texas of today also currently facing a housing crisis).
We arrived a day early and headed over to the second night of the fest. I’m pretty sure everyone one of us ended up drunk, but only one of us ended up throwing up into a bucket while taking a shit (not me, I swear). I checked out Ceremonial Bloodbath, which was special because the drummer, along with Pserah, were the ones who rescued me from the border one time when the rest of Exhumed was denied entry into Canada and I had to catch a flight out of Vancouver. We also saw Goatwhore and the crowd was great. I was looking forward to our show.
I realized after taking this photo that I first shared a stage with Sammy from Goatwhore 30 years back in 1994 when he was playing with Acid Bath and I was with Exhumed. That made me feel older than my 30th high school anniversary.
The next day, we all got up really really slowly, everyone hung over as fuck, but in a good way. The previous night’s partying was kinda what we all needed. We don’t get to hang all the time like we did when were mere pups. We managed to scrape our asses up for a soundcheck, but before showtime, Sean had arranged for us to meet up with Kyle Huculak, an SFX artist based out of Edmonton.
Kyle is a fan of our hooded foursome and had sent us a custom mask he made to be used in a future stage show. What luck that we ended booking a show in his town just a few months later!
His shop is awesome. And very very CLEAN (a fact I pointed out to our resident mess maker, Mr. Sean Bloodbath McGrath). He does some work for movies but I believe his bread and butter is custom recreations for fans.
He’s obviously quite a fan of horror himself. He laid some knowledge on us and we basically just geeked out over his cool collection of shit.
Unfortunately we had to wrap things up pretty quick as we were growing short on time. We were headlining the secondary stage so our show was pretty early. It was hard to pull from the awesomeness though.
But pull away we did, with just about a half hour left to get food and rush our asses back stage to prep for our show. In the meantime, I caught a bit of Fetid Grave and they were heavy as fuck. Then it was time for us to go on.
We did our line check, donned our gay apparel, and played a rusty but competent set. We hadn’t jammed as a whole band since the Municipal Waste tour back in February / March. The kids got splattered with mosh riffs and fake blood, though, so they were quite pleased. Afterwards, we cleaned up, loaded out and went to check out Gatecreeper close out the festival to a throng of very happy Edmontonians.
We got up and flew back the next day with very little hassle. And that was our very very short time in Edmonton. It was nice to be back, but I really really wish we’d had time to go to the water park and do the 360ยบ water slide loop. Maybe next time.