By Christopher Crone – Buy us a Coffee on Ko-fi https://ko-fi.com/capitalchaostv
Thursday night at Goldfield Trading Post wasn’t your typical weeknight concert. This was the kind of night where you walk through the doors expecting a metal show and leave wondering if you’ve somehow survived an exorcism. Cultus Black, Ov Sulfur, and DevilDriver brought three very different flavors of darkness to the stage, and each one turned the temperature up another notch. From horror-movie theatrics and blackened deathcore to the groove-metal wrecking ball that is DevilDriver, Goldfield was in for a night of brutality, sweat, and enough controlled chaos to make a Thursday feel like Saturday night in hell.
Cultus Black came rolling out of Raleigh, North Carolina, and immediately made it clear that this wasn’t going to be some ordinary opening set. This was fucking nightmare fuel.
Their sound throws nu-metal, metalcore, industrial metal, and deathcore into a Ninja Bullet blender set to “destroy everything”, and then apparently hits the button and walks away. But it was the visual side of Cultus Black that really grabbed me. Bandages. Masks. Distorted faces. Industrial-looking horror.
Standing in front of the stage with a camera, I couldn’t help but think I’d somehow wandered into a Resident Evil level and was waiting for something ugly to crawl out of the shadows. Their look had that same grotesque, infected quality as the burlap-masked Ganados, with more than a little of The Evil Within thrown into the mix. Except these monsters were on stage. And they were insanely loud.
I’ve seen plenty of bands compared to Slipknot, but Cultus Black didn’t feel like a copy of anybody. They created their own twisted little universe, and for the duration of their set, Goldfield was inside it. The atmosphere was creepy as hell without becoming some cheap Halloween gimmick. Every movement, mask, light, and musical hit seemed designed to make the audience just a little more uncomfortable — in exactly the right way. I was sold almost immediately.
Cultus Black made a fan out of me before they were even finished with their set. And from behind the camera, this was the kind of production you live for. Every time the lights hit, there was another shot waiting to happen. Every pose looked like a frame from a horror movie. For a concert photographer, it is like Christmas morning.
If Cultus Black dragged us into the nightmare, Ov Sulfur showed up to set the place on fire. Coming out of Las Vegas, Ov Sulfur delivered a punishing combination of blackened deathcore and symphonic deathcore, stacking crushing breakdowns against darker atmospheric textures and melodic cleans. And then there was Ricky Hoover up front.
Anyone familiar with his work with Suffokate knows the guy doesn’t exactly walk onto a stage looking for a quiet evening. He arrived with annihilation in his eyes Ov Sulfur’s set had that perfect push-and-pull between absolute brutality and atmosphere. One minute you’re getting hammered by a breakdown, and the next there’s this huge melodic or symphonic element opening everything back up before the band drops the hammer again.
That dynamic kept the crowd engaged and the pit moving. There was no wasted motion. No dead air. Just one crushing section after another. Ov Sulfur didn’t simply warm the room up for DevilDriver. They beat the crap out of it first.
Then came DevilDriver. And that’s when Goldfield officially became a problem. There are bands that play heavy music, and then there are bands that sound like they were specifically designed to knock the walls off a building. DevilDriver is the second kind. The band’s name itself comes from the Italian benandanti tradition of ritual bells used to drive away negative energy, and judging by what happened inside Goldfield, they took that concept pretty fucking seriously.
From the first riff, DevilDriver came out with the kind of aggression that doesn’t politely ask you to move. It moves you. This is a band that has played massive festivals in front of tens of thousands of people and has even been associated with the attempt to create one of the largest circle pits in metal history. But seeing that same band packed into Goldfield Trading Post was something completely different.
This wasn’t a distant stage with thousands of people between you and the band. This was close quarters combat. Every riff felt like it was hitting you directly in the chest. The sweat, the bodies, the noise, the movement — everything was compressed into one loud, filthy, beautiful mess. And that’s exactly where DevilDriver belongs. The current Strike and Kill era feels like the band has stripped away the bullshit and gone straight back to the foundation: write the riffs, play the music, hit the stage, and fucking destroy the place.
No unnecessary bullshit. Just groove, Aggression, and riffs. Lots and lots of fucking riffs. Watching DevilDriver unleash that kind of power in a relatively small room was a reminder of why heavy music works so damn well in clubs. You can feel the bass in your chest. You can see the sweat flying off the stage. You can feel the crowd surge.
There was no barrier between the band and the chaos. It was like standing between two opposing forces on a battlefield, crouched down in the photo pit with the crowd surging behind you and DevilDriver pounding away from the stage. I found myself watching for safety clues from one of Goldfield Security’s Santos while trying to anticipate the next burst of movement, the next wave of bodies, and the next shot worth risking my position for.
As a photographer, that’s part of the adrenaline. You’re not just watching the show — you’re reading the room, watching security, watching the crowd, and waiting for that split-second when everything lines up for the shot. Goldfield wasn’t hosting DevilDriver on Thursday night. Goldfield was being tested by DevilDriver.
By the end of the set, the place felt less like a concert venue and more like a battlefield that had been thoroughly scrubbed clean by groove metal, sweat, and several metric tons of attitude. Thursday night you thought? DevilDriver turned it into Friday night in hell. And honestly, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
Capital Chaos TV was there. The cameras were rolling. The pit was moving. And DevilDriver left absolutely nothing standing.
Categories: Concert Photography
Leave a Reply