Shooting the entirety of Hassle Fest is kind of like running a very weird, loud marathon. With 40-plus acts spread over three short nights and sets rarely expanding beyond 20 minutes, there’s an insane amount of music to see and some jarring tonal shifts. You could be zoning out to a pastoral dream-pop band one minute and be assaulted by a blaring noise set the next. The same goes from a photography perspective. I shot details of electronic musicians carefully tweaking their banks of equipment, and I also chased David Yow through a mosh pit. But of course, that’s part of the fun. No matter how familiar you are with the bill, there are always surprises to be had at Hassle Fest.
Its seventh edition kicked off with a night at the Cambridge Elks Lodge, headlined by a furious set from Downtown Boys. The Providence-based collective offered off-kilter, sax-augmented and politically-charged punk rock with passion and urgency. Locals (New England) Patriots got up close and personal with the crowd, while former locals Free Pizza had the crowd get up close with them in the Lodge’s exceptionally sweaty second room. The tongue-in-cheek, drum machine hardcore punk of Western MA’s Urochromes was another early festival highlight.
Friday’s festivities moved over to Allston’s Brighton Music Hall, which was decked out in an aluminum foil art installation and a miniature second stage to accommodate the rotating set schedule. Dent opened the evening with an intense, hair-whipping set. Cloud Becomes Your Hand brought the playful psychedelic vibes. Dreamcrusher crashed into the crowd and screamed atop the bar over desolate, howling soundscapes. Battle Trance and the Paul Flaherty/Bill Nace/Chris Corsano trio enthralled with free-improv madness, and local heroes Pile and New Jersey’s Screaming Females dished out some left-of-the-dial rock ‘n’ roll. Females’ Marissa Paternoster exhibited the weekend’s purest and most positively face-melting fretwork.
Saturday’s concluding installment was the weekend’s most stacked day, raging from 3 in the afternoon until midnight and beyond. Boston’s Los Condenados were an afternoon jolt, sounding a bit like Damo Suzuki fronting a band of jet engines. Pucker Up’s treated-guitar noise rock recalled the clang of early Sonic Youth. Florida’s Jake Tobin proffered zany, pitch-shifted songs, and Sadist followed up with some nasty, stobe-lit crust punk complete with a box of chains and a masked vocalist. Olivia Neutron-John’s piercing stare and immersive keyboard compositions proved an arresting combination. Cleveland’s Obnox ripped through a lean, mean set of noisy garage-rock gems. The trio of Heathen Shame, featuring trumpeter Greg Kelley and guitarists Wayne Rogers and Kate Village of Major Stars, engaged in a wailing, mind-bending improv session that saw the performers giving themselves over to the power of their instruments, collapsing on the stage, jumping into the crowd and otherwise wielding them like divining rods. Long-running Chicago experimentalists Ono impressed with a strangely mesmerizing set that culminated in a flooring warped-gospel cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.”
Ex-Battles member Tyondai Braxton performed a knotty electronic set as the penultimate headline performer of the evening, and then the reunited Flipper proceeded to dismantle the entire room. With Scratch Acid and The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow newly assuming lead vocal duties, the San Francisco-originating sludge-punks sounded absolutely ferocious and generated the wildest crowd of the weekend. Yow, who spent a good portion of the set cracking dirty jokes, downing Budweisers and diving into the crowd, was a revelation on the mic. If there was anyone to embody the spirits of the retired Bruce Loose and tragically deceased Will Shatter, Yow is the man. He brought a potent, abrasive energy to the stage (and the floor) that honored the band’s original spirit. It was a totally out-of-control monster of a set; the perfect way to close out Hassle Fest 7.
