If you don’t know the metal trio, check out Black Tusk’s Facebook page, which has over 31,000 fans.

Or you can just head right over to the band’s page at Relapse Records where you can read more about, sample, and buy the EP Tend No Wounds.

Or find Black Tusk on iTunes.

I’ve never tried to get any really good photos of Black Tusk in action, so I’m planning to be at Friday’s show at The Jinx.

In my column, I suggest that the video for “Truth Untold” is one of the best music videos that’s ever been shot in Savannah. I’m pretty sure the embed isn’t going to work, so click on the above link to see it on Vimeo.

Black Tusk “Truth Untold” Music Video from Tytan on Vimeo.

Here’s a moment from the video embedded via the band’s Facebook page:

The band members of Baroness and their crew are recovering from injuries sustained after their tour bus crashed outside of Bath, England early on Wednesday morning.

John Baizley has broken his left arm and left leg. Allen Blickle and Matt Maggioni each suffered fractured vertebrae. All three remain in the hospital as of this writing. Pete Adams has been treated and released from the hospital.

Three of the five crew members who were on the bus have also been treated and released. One member is still undergoing testing. The driver of the bus remains in critical condition.

Please stay tuned for further updates. Thank you for all the support during this extremely difficult time.

UPDATE, 8/20, ANOTHER MESSAGE AND PIC EMBEDDED FROM THE BARONESS FACEBOOK PAGE (hover over the pic or click “View on Facebook” to see the full message:

The bus was hired from a German company, as I understand it. As I noted in a post yesterday that includes video of the crash site, the bus was going through a driving rain in bath, came down a hill, failed to make the necessary right turn, left the roadway, and fell about 30 feet.

Baroness was founded in Savannah in 2003 and was touring Europe to promote their latest release, a double album Yellow & Green. Here’s a great video recently posted to the Baroness website via Guitar World:

Pete Adams was also featured recently in Fishing World about his love of fly fishing.

For those like me who want to show their support but don’t know what to do, I’m thinking this would be a good time to buy some merch

Click here for the Baroness store at Relapse Records.

Click here to purchase Yellow & Green on iTunes.

There were nine people on the bus. All were injured when the bus left the roadway during heavy rain and fell 30 feet at about 11:30 a.m. local time after coming down a steep hill and failing to execute a right turn. The two more seriously injured people on the German-registered bus were stuck in the wreckage for some time. Those two people, who have not yet been publicly identified, are being treated in Bristol. The other seven are in Bath.

All reports indicate that none of the injuries are life-threatening, however. I will share more information as it is made public.

Baroness was near the end of this European tour. There were scheduled to play a show in Southampton tonight at The Talking Heads as well as several shows in Germany this weekend. Those are obviously postponed.

Baroness was promoting their recent double album Yellow & Green.

My best to all for a speedy recovery.

Here’s the BBC report from the site of the crash:

From Spin:

The members of alt-metallers Baroness were involved in a serious accident today when their bus fell 30 feet off a viaduct near Bath in the U.K., landing on its side, at about 11:30 am British Standard Time, the BBC reports. The band — whose latest release, Yellow & Green is a SPIN Essential we dubbed the “metal album of the year” — was headed from a show in Bristol to Southampton, where they were to play tonight. Firefighters released two passengers who were trapped on board — one was the driver, according to ITV, but it’s not clear whether the other was a band members or crew — who were immediately treated by first responders and brought to a hospital in Bristol. The other seven passengers, who were able to escape on their own, are also receiving medical attention at a hospital in Bath.

From Relapse Records via Pitchfork:

Baroness have been involved in a motor coach accident in the Bath area of England.

All band members and personnel on board are currently receiving medical treatment.

The band had performed in Bristol last night and were traveling to Southampton for a performance at Talking Heads this evening.

All remaining dates on the band’s European tour have been canceled. Additional details to come as more information is available.

I’ll post updates later today as additional information becomes available.

The Baroness website and Facebook page look like they will also be updated regularly.

Click here for BBC coverage.

Jucifer:

Check out the Facebook event page for more links.

I last wrote about Black Tusk here on this blog back in February.

I know a fair number of Savannah’s metal musicians personally — and they’re as nice as anyone I know. But they channel some real undercurrents in the local scene: the relishing of the richness of life and friendship combined with an overarching cynicism. That’s how I see it anyway.

Andrew, James, and Athon at The Jinx

The new album has already been covered glowingly on NPR’s blog All Things Considered in a post called “Black Tusk: Keg Party At The End Of The World”:

Bred from the same swampy waters as like-minded metal bands Kylesa and Baroness, the Savannah, Ga., sludge-metal trio has always been a bit more about the backyard keg party than its peers, which is exactly what kicked my ass when I first saw the band play a Boys and Girls Club at the 2009 MACRoCk Festival. Last year’s Taste the Sin sacrificed some of the debut album’s kick-ass-ery to streamlined production, but with no time to spare, Black Tusk is already back with Set the Dial. Black Tusk has figured out how to raise hell and sound slick all at once, which you can hear in this premiere of the album’s fastest track, “Carved in Stone.”

Metal Injection hits similar notes:

With all due respect to New Orleans, the center of the sludge universe has in recent years shifted to Savannah, Georgia, that sleepy burg of 136,000 that lacks even a major university to explain the explosive growth in upper tier heavy metal that’s been erupting out of the region over the past several years. The Savannah metal scene is not a large one, but its three primary exports – Kylesa, Black Tusk, and Baroness – have all gained prominence as upper echelon sludge bands in recent years.

And Exclaim:

Black Tusk have slowly been building a name for themselves as one of the rising stars of Savannah, GA’s metal underground. With Set the Dial, their upcoming fourth album and second for Relapse Records, the band have proven they are indeed big players in the metal scene. And they did it by releasing their most rock-ish album yet. [. . .]

And what Black Tusk is at this point is a sleek, streamlined machine, a band taking the bass-heavy downtrodden sounds of sludge metal and filtering them through rock sensibilities, creating a disc that is enjoyable and fun like stoner rock, yet brutal and heavy enough to keep the extreme metalheads happy.

I don’t know if any Savannah band has been traveling as much in recent years as Black Tusk, a hard-charging metal band whose three members — Andrew Fidler, James May, and Jonathan Athon — create more sound than you’d think three people would be able to. They’ve just launched a European tour with Howl, playing 19 gigs in 24 days.

Here’s the video of “Red Eyes, Black Skies”:

Taste the Sin

Here are the European dates:
02/04/11 Saarbrücken, Germany Garage w/ Howl
02/05/11 Essen, Germany Cafe nova w/ Howl
02/06/11 Amsterdam, Netherlands Winston w/ Howl
02/07/11 Manchester, United Kingdom Star & Garter w/ Black Tusk
02/08/11 Glasgow, United Kingdom Ivory Blacks w/ Howl
02/09/11 London, United Kingdom Underworld w/ Howl
02/10/11 Gent, Belgium Decadance w/ Howl
02/12/11 Poitier, France Le Confort Moderne w/ Howl
02/15/11 Segrate, Italy Magnolia w/ Howl
02/16/11 Parma, Italy Le Male Club w/ Howl
02/17/11 Munchen, Germany Feierwerk w/ Howl
02/18/11 Ljubljana, Slovenia Orto Bar w/ Howl
02/19/11 Budapest, Hungary Tündergyar w/ Howl
02/20/11 Wien, Austria Arena w/ Howl
02/21/11 Berlin, Germany Cassiopeia w/ Howl
02/23/11 Hamburg, Germany Hafenklang w/ Howl
02/24/11 Copenhagen, Denmark Beta w/ Howl
02/26/11 Helsinki, Finland Nosturi w/ Howl
02/27/11 Tampere, Finland Klubi w/ Howl

But it sure couldn’t hurt.

Lemmy is about Lemmy Kilmister, who founded the early metal band Motorhead in 1975 and has been synonymous with the band ever since. (Lemmy consistently says Motorhead just plays rock & roll and cites classic American rockers among his influences.) For the most part Lemmy comes across as an engaging, unpretentious, and even warm person, despite the fame, the military iconography with which he surrounds himself, and the cultivated severity of his appearance.

I caught Lemmy this week at the 8th annual Psychotronic Film Festival at Muse Arts Warehouse here in Savannah. The film had its American premiere last March at the South by Southwest Film Festival.

Perhaps the most impressive element of Lemmy is the relentless (I mean that in a good way) inclusion of clips of interviews by those who consider Lemmy not only a musical influence but a cultural revolutionary: Ozzie Osborne, Joan Jett, Slash, Lars Frederiksen of Rancid, James Hetfield of Metallica, guitarist Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction, Ice-T, Henry Rollins, and on and on. One has to admire the legwork and perseverance of the filmmakers to get so many big names to be interviewed — the settings are varied, the excerpts concise, the anecdotes sharp, the sound good, the tattoos stunning.

There’s some good concert footage too, but the film could have used more.

At almost two hours, Lemmy feels long. Since the documentary does not unfold in any sort of chronological order (nor should it necessarily), the viewer doesn’t have any sense of where the film will go from one moment to the next. That works really well at times, like in the sudden flashback to Lemmy’s pre-Motorhead days with the British band Hawkwind. Apparently, the falling out came when Lemmy, an inveterate abuser of stimulants while the rest of the band preferred psychedelics, was arrested at the Canadian border.

And the unpredictable structure makes the sudden appearance of the talking heads all the more effective.

But my heart sank a bit when, deep into the film and at a point where it was beginning to feel too long, we suddenly flashed all the way back to Lemmy’s childhood. How many more hours was this going to go?

Perhaps the biggest problem with the film, in addition to some scenes that could be cut in their entirety such as a pointless and poorly recorded conversation with Billy Bob Thornton, is that we get too much Lemmy. I liked several of the vignettes of Lemmy in his cluttered apartment, but I could have done without some of the repetitive clips of Lemmy walking outside, walking on the sidewalk, getting into his limo, riding in his limo, etc., etc. It seems at some moments that the filmmakers were just a little too much in awe of their subject.

Lemmy’s understated mumble can also be hard to understand. The filmmakers were obviously aware of this difficulty as occasionally they added subtitles. I needed a lot more of those.

While there are some obvious spots where the film could have been trimmed, there are other aspects that begged for more detail, like the compelling interviews with the other members of Hawkwind, whose faces are as battle-scarred as the 60-something Lemmy’s. I guess the filmmakers went as far as they could under the circumstances, but I would love to have seen Lemmy pressed a bit more about his fascination with military history and his roomful of Nazi memorabilia. Hard to give someone a free pass on that.

Lemmy is an impressive film on many levels, and I’m guessing that — a few obvious faults aside — it’s going to hold up well over time. The energy and urgency and vibrancy of metal finds new young fans all the time, and they’re going to dig themselves eventually back to Motorhead and Lemmy.