(BadWolf and friends attended a special performance by Goatwhore in Toledo on March 7. This is his review, plus his on-site interview of Ben Falgoust and Sammy Duet. All photos accompanying this post were taken for NCS by Nicholas Vechery.)

I’ve had the most rotten luck with local shows lately. That awesome Black Dahlia Murder/Skeletonwitch/Nile tour was supposed to come through my hometown, as was the Faceless/Dying Fetus/Goatwhore tour. Both of those were cancelled. In fairness, the Black Dahlia Murder decided to headline a huge local metalcore festival—the Jamboree—instead, but I’m no huge proponent of skinny-jean deathcore. Thank god (or satan or wotan or whatever) for Goatwhore, who decided to play Toledo anyway—for free.

Ramalama Records

Goatwhore picked the perfect venue: Toledo’s finest record store, Ramalama Records. I have a long history with the establishment; it’s fair to say I would not be a metalhead were it not for the owner, Rob, and his clerk, Nick. A story within a story:

I rode into the store on bicycle on a Saturday afternoon at the age of 15. I was dressed in black jeans and a Master of Puppets tee-shirt—Nick said I was the first cool-looking guy to enter the store all day, and as such if I bought a record the second would be half off. A sick deal, but I had no idea what to get, so I just pointed at my tee shirt and said “Stuff like this.”

Nick picked out Municipal Waste’s Hazardous Mutation record. “What’s that sound like?” Nick threw it on the stereo.

“The good old days,” he said. Twenty seconds into ‘Unleash the Bastards’, I said he had himself a deal.

For my second buy I took a gander at the new releases shelf, and a  record cover caught my eye—some really great art of a ship being sunk by a whale. The band was called Mastodon. The album, obviously, was Leviathan. Nick let me listen to “Blood and Thunder”, and that was the end of normalcy in my life. $20 or so later, I was in metal for life. Continue reading »