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Immortal Dominion, a heavy metal band from Fort Collins.
On a cold Friday night, in the basement of a north Fort Collins home rented out by three students, the usual loud music of a college house shakes the windows.
But it isn’t the stereo blasting—it’s the sound of heavy metal jamming by the trio of students.
It’s the sound of perseverance.
Nick Olaf, Daniel Sprague and Matt Utley of Disengage are busy away churning out heavy riffs and double blast beats, accompanied by screeching and growling vocals. The threesome has been playing together for a little more than five years, playing house parties and small gigs, mostly around Fort Collins and Denver.
Their story is the same as most aspiring heavy metal bands in the area—grinding out a musical existence with the odds against turning their passion into a career. Still, they keep on playing.
Perseverance.
“We’re just trying to get a name for ourselves,” says a heavily-bearded 25-year-old Utley. “There’s a small, but growing metal scene up here that we’d like to see get a lot bigger.”
The scene, known for its more popular bands such as longtime veterans Immortal Dominion, The Mandrake and Skinned, was dormant for a couple of years, but is resurging with a new lineup of bands, as well as some veteran acts putting out new material.
Brian Villers, one of the original members of Immortal Dominion, has witnessed the scene’s ups and downs during the last two decades.
“They wouldn’t let you play metal anywhere in Fort Collins when we first started out,” Villers said. “We used to have to play at the Old Town Arcade, then we started playing The Starlight.”
Now called Hodi’s Halfnote, which is on North College, The Starlight catered to many metal and punk acts during its eight-year stint. Such well-known acts as the Misfits, DRI and Rise Against played to a packed house at the small venue.
“That place was the loudest sweatbox,” said Jake Thrash, formerly of Debacle, a Denver metal band. “We played there in ’04 for this all-day metal-fest in the middle of summer. When it was all said and done, my ears were ringing for two days straight and I’d lost 10 pounds.”
With a last name like Thrash, the stocky vocalist/lead guitarist was destined to play metal from an early age. Picking up a guitar at age 9, Thrash took a liking to Metallica and Iron Maiden.
“They were the gateway to harder stuff like Slayer and Morbid Angel,” he said. “And once you start getting into those extreme genres of metal, there’s really no going back to (stuff) like Motley Crue or Poison.”
Death metal, metal’s most extreme genre, is well represented in the Loveland/Fort Collins area. Skinned formed in 1995 with Travis Weickum on guitar and vocals, Dave Dundas on bass, and Tom Sandage on drums. They have opened for such known acts as Static X, Unearth, Deicide and Kreator.
“The (metal) scene is hit or miss up here,” Weickum said. “It’s hard for our genre to get a whole lotta gigs in Fort Collins.”
Many bands have run into this obstacle. With the closing of The Starlight, as well as Archer’s, Diamond’s Billiards, and the Back Alley Lounge, three bars that also catered to heavy metal acts, finding a location to host them has become more difficult than ever.
“It’s not as if there aren’t enough good bands, it’s that there is not enough support from the local community,” said Justin Vaughan, a Colorado State University student who plays bass in the progressive thrash-metal band Gashead. Vaughan, Mike Lopez, Josh Purdy and Nate Scofield make up the four-piece ensemble who recently released their first full-length LP, The Isolationist, on Fist Records.
“The hardest part to making it here is finding places to play,” said bass player Kent Cutler of Autumn Burn, a melodic Fort Collins metal band with musical roots seeded in Faith No More, Alice In Chains and Acid Bath. “But the scene is getting stronger as evidenced by the turnout of the crowds. There’s a lot more people coming out.”
The attribution can be found with the comeback of metal over the past decade. When grunge music and the Seattle scene, with bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, came into the limelight in the early ’90s, metal took an abrupt nosedive. Grunge bands were influenced by the heavy metal sound, but rejected the excesses of the more popular metal bands, becoming the most popular form of hard rock music at the time. But, by the mid-to-late ’90s, the phenomenon that was grunge began to die, and a new wave of U.S. metal groups emerged.
“As soon as Kurt Cobain put that shotgun to his head, metal was on the rise again,” said Andy Hitch, guitarist for The Mandrake and owner of Madison amps. “The New Wave of American Heavy Metal paved the way.”
Hitch is referring to the influx of nu metal acts in the late ’90s, which incorporated elements of hip-hop and metal, and the rise of metalcore in recent years, which blends harmonic and guttural vocals into a blend of thrash, death and hardcore riffs and beats.
Hitch hooked up with Ron Corrillo in 1999 to form The Mandrake, a melodic death metal outfit out of Loveland that has released two full-length albums and are in the studio recording a third.
“Metal is making a comeback,” Corrillo said. “There was a strong scene up here, then
it died out for awhile, but now, more and more kids are coming out to the shows.”
But it isn’t the stereo blasting—it’s the sound of heavy metal jamming by the trio of students.
It’s the sound of perseverance.
Nick Olaf, Daniel Sprague and Matt Utley of Disengage are busy away churning out heavy riffs and double blast beats, accompanied by screeching and growling vocals. The threesome has been playing together for a little more than five years, playing house parties and small gigs, mostly around Fort Collins and Denver.
Their story is the same as most aspiring heavy metal bands in the area—grinding out a musical existence with the odds against turning their passion into a career. Still, they keep on playing.
Perseverance.
“We’re just trying to get a name for ourselves,” says a heavily-bearded 25-year-old Utley. “There’s a small, but growing metal scene up here that we’d like to see get a lot bigger.”
The scene, known for its more popular bands such as longtime veterans Immortal Dominion, The Mandrake and Skinned, was dormant for a couple of years, but is resurging with a new lineup of bands, as well as some veteran acts putting out new material.
Brian Villers, one of the original members of Immortal Dominion, has witnessed the scene’s ups and downs during the last two decades.
“They wouldn’t let you play metal anywhere in Fort Collins when we first started out,” Villers said. “We used to have to play at the Old Town Arcade, then we started playing The Starlight.”
Now called Hodi’s Halfnote, which is on North College, The Starlight catered to many metal and punk acts during its eight-year stint. Such well-known acts as the Misfits, DRI and Rise Against played to a packed house at the small venue.
“That place was the loudest sweatbox,” said Jake Thrash, formerly of Debacle, a Denver metal band. “We played there in ’04 for this all-day metal-fest in the middle of summer. When it was all said and done, my ears were ringing for two days straight and I’d lost 10 pounds.”
With a last name like Thrash, the stocky vocalist/lead guitarist was destined to play metal from an early age. Picking up a guitar at age 9, Thrash took a liking to Metallica and Iron Maiden.
“They were the gateway to harder stuff like Slayer and Morbid Angel,” he said. “And once you start getting into those extreme genres of metal, there’s really no going back to (stuff) like Motley Crue or Poison.”
Death metal, metal’s most extreme genre, is well represented in the Loveland/Fort Collins area. Skinned formed in 1995 with Travis Weickum on guitar and vocals, Dave Dundas on bass, and Tom Sandage on drums. They have opened for such known acts as Static X, Unearth, Deicide and Kreator.
“The (metal) scene is hit or miss up here,” Weickum said. “It’s hard for our genre to get a whole lotta gigs in Fort Collins.”
Many bands have run into this obstacle. With the closing of The Starlight, as well as Archer’s, Diamond’s Billiards, and the Back Alley Lounge, three bars that also catered to heavy metal acts, finding a location to host them has become more difficult than ever.
“It’s not as if there aren’t enough good bands, it’s that there is not enough support from the local community,” said Justin Vaughan, a Colorado State University student who plays bass in the progressive thrash-metal band Gashead. Vaughan, Mike Lopez, Josh Purdy and Nate Scofield make up the four-piece ensemble who recently released their first full-length LP, The Isolationist, on Fist Records.
“The hardest part to making it here is finding places to play,” said bass player Kent Cutler of Autumn Burn, a melodic Fort Collins metal band with musical roots seeded in Faith No More, Alice In Chains and Acid Bath. “But the scene is getting stronger as evidenced by the turnout of the crowds. There’s a lot more people coming out.”
The attribution can be found with the comeback of metal over the past decade. When grunge music and the Seattle scene, with bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, came into the limelight in the early ’90s, metal took an abrupt nosedive. Grunge bands were influenced by the heavy metal sound, but rejected the excesses of the more popular metal bands, becoming the most popular form of hard rock music at the time. But, by the mid-to-late ’90s, the phenomenon that was grunge began to die, and a new wave of U.S. metal groups emerged.
“As soon as Kurt Cobain put that shotgun to his head, metal was on the rise again,” said Andy Hitch, guitarist for The Mandrake and owner of Madison amps. “The New Wave of American Heavy Metal paved the way.”
Hitch is referring to the influx of nu metal acts in the late ’90s, which incorporated elements of hip-hop and metal, and the rise of metalcore in recent years, which blends harmonic and guttural vocals into a blend of thrash, death and hardcore riffs and beats.
Hitch hooked up with Ron Corrillo in 1999 to form The Mandrake, a melodic death metal outfit out of Loveland that has released two full-length albums and are in the studio recording a third.
“Metal is making a comeback,” Corrillo said. “There was a strong scene up here, then
it died out for awhile, but now, more and more kids are coming out to the shows.”
