- Courtesy the artist
- A reasonably recent image of Revenge, who do not appear to care much about promo photos
It’s hard to explain why I’m looking forward to Revenge, since I’ve never seen them before—the closest they’ve come to playing Chicago since forming 15 years ago was a gig in Aurora in 2003. But my most devoted metal-nerd friends—folks who’ve forgotten more about kvlt bands than I’ll ever know—all but hyperventilate with excitement at the prospect of a Revenge show. And afterward, they might post stuff on Twitter along the lines of “Revenge just flattened Webster Hall. I can’t imagine any band following them with any luck.”
Over spattery, hammering drumming and a constant taut churn of riffs that never reaches any sort of cathartic harmonic resolution, Read’s vocals leapfrog among several distinct varieties of incoherent fury, often employing two at once via the magic of overdubbing—there’s not only genre-appropriate growling and shrieking, but also disturbingly guttural chthonic gurgling and something so demented and blown-out it sounds like he just took a belt sander to a live microphone. The overall impression is of a creature with six arms and at least three throats trying to beat down a door you’re fighting to hold shut.
