How sweet it is to watch a thing become truly itself—to see it uncoiling from its core and putting on that hard-won muscle of singularity. This band Scissorfight are approaching their crowning moment, their acme and acropolis. It's metal, isn't it? Vulgarity made pure and stomping fatly about, joy in its heart, blatting you with anal eruptions—it is HEAVY METAL and it is generous with its apprentices, repaying them love for love: as a metal band gets better it naturally gets heavier. The Scissorfight brand you can call militia metal, being as how it's concerned with themes of rugged individualism and hot with the libertarian stink of NEW HAMPSHIRE, MOTHERFUCKER!—Weed guns and axes!/ We don't pay our taxes! —which is where they're from, where according to legend they were birthed in a disused meat-locker at the foot of Mt. Washington, jamming in a space so cramped that singer Ironlung had his head squashed sideways against the ceiling, with music horribly redounding in this box from which the band will emerge salty as anchovies from the tin. It's the sound of the Granite State, a big slaggy agglomeration of traditional musics—Sabbath, Zep, AC/DC, ZZ Top even—smelted together at huge temperatures, further punked-out and metallicised and performed with its own back-country swing, a kind of slowed-down and insanely pressurised hoedown, skirling shanties moving at the pace of a monster truck rollover on action replay.

Ironlung is a giant with shaved head and a beard like a burst of exhaust. He can bring his voice right down to a low end death-belch, a quake in the PA, that point at which bass starts urping like a toad and sucking in light. A glance at the lyrics reveals that he is also the Melville of metal, or better yet the Cormac McCarthy: I refer you to "Curse of The Returned Astronaut" for its psychedelically drenched mindscape of tainted leering sunsets and vulturous wingbeats...I'm a screaming eagle/ I'm a screaming evil... At any rate we are dealing with an apocalyptic sensibility, Americano to the root, tuned in but growling as if recieving a bad signal to that wavelength where men fight beasts, become beasts, get crushed inside and out by implacable bulks of raw nature etc. Grotesques abound because life is too goddamn BIG to be normal. Buccaneers and cowboys. Judgement-figures stalking about under black hats, monkeys of upstart intelligence beating dogs with sticks, and men half-eaten by bears who find time to muse thus: Alpine... sunshine... where's my ass and where's my spine? Then there's all the rural rage: Stand our ground/ Mountain compound/ When they storm the gate/ we retaliate. This ain't exactly satire—there's way too much downward-tending mass in the sound, too much earthbound fucking wallop to allow for any frail plume of irony—but it is humour, both bearish and hallucinatory. The acid-hilarious wink and the guffaw that sounds like a tank changing gear. My penis is flaccid! I'm frying on acid!

It's a notable thing, before a Scissorfight show, to watch Ironlung sink into character—the eyes acquire that specific distanced gleam, as if reflecting hilltop fires—(another Jack and Coke)—the beard starts out even more brusquely, churning with static—(and another)—the chest lifts, the shoulders go back—wartime! There's something here—if you'll permit me a little hop into psycho-literary speculation—of the set-up in "'Drunken Hangman": Drinks all day in the tavern/ before the gallows pole/ outside the crowd has gathered/ waiting for the show... All condensed with drink the hangman loiters as it were in the vestibule of his atrocities and makes the crowd pant for it, the black deeds waxing to fulfilment in his blood, ripening to the moment when he steps out and DOES'em—he gives the cheering village/ what they expect. That's the beauty, it is just what we expect, the ritual of metal, chunks of weight held in religious balance.

And oh how the people love Scissorfight. They open with "Granite State Destroyer"—We've gotta/ War to wage!—and soon enough the pit goes

off. Pour this much power onto a crowd and it will happen, it must—the pressure rises, groans in the ears, bears down until the front rows start to snicker and fizz, little slithers of energy snaking sideways until it all suddenly pops open into flying elbows and heads dipped for charging. Skirmishing bodies. Ping, zing, reality's screws go flying, the bulkhead quakes, we're getting rattled into something else here—pit-mind, undermind, backbrain. Good gracious the volume. These days I'm

strictly earplugs—they are the prophylactics of the concertgoer, comparable indeed to condoms because as in sex one gives up the high end, the splash and tingle, for a deeper acquaintance with impact, with the bang of opposing hips. Plugging your ears opens you to the bass in a quite startling way—it reaches up at you from the floor, prowls behind your ribs, happens right in the middle of your brain like some naturally-occurring chemical process. The beaten mind compensates with visions—you trip out, you see landscapes—the mountains, the mountains of the Granite State, humped and steaming and rasping their flanks like buffalo—look on a landform map and the White Mountains appear as a mauve contusion, the colour of scabbed knuckles—they've got granite up there 120 million years old, and everything's moving—this century within the borders of New Hampshire there have been 180 earthquakes.

New Hampshire is beautiful because it keeps its ugliness close—herding its vile diners and strips of shitty neon into the rainy foothills, draping itself in malls like plastic jewellery. Out in the franchised wilderness the poet writes:Mister Donut had a hell/ of a big jagged hole through both/sides of its glass sign. I/saw the killdeer running that has/her nest next to the high-/ way on the gravel strip between Rite-Aid and Sunoco,/ And I heard her cry in the gnash/ of heat at my window... (that's Hayden Carruth, actually writing about upstate New York, but the NH vibe is caught.) God love the trash, and all the action around it—no helmet law on the roads, geological fission in the mountains, truckwheels whizzing and then biting into autumnal gradients and the vehicle suddenly rampant with a roar of appetite. The latest Scissorfight album is simply called "New Hampshire" and you can hear it all in there, an entire state's fevered comical imagining of itself. As in all the best metallurgy the band blows a hole and then fills it, expands behind its own detonation (leaving a crucial half-second lag for true heaviness to manifest) with all manner of parody, grandiosity and pumping devil-signs, bellows of red-eyed survivalist cheerleading. Our battle cry/ Live free or die! In this dimension of fleeing boundaries you need to be OUTSIZE to make it.

I once asked Ironlung about the chorus to "Musk Ox" an indecipherable line growled and spat as he lurches like a wounded mammoth. It's not rock till I piss you pants, he tells me. Not rock till I piss YOUR pants? No, he says, till I piss YOU pants. So you're really talking to your trousers—you're saying, look out pants, I'm gonna piss you. He darkens. No thats not it either.

Back in the pit two of the movers and shakers smack into each other so hard they stagger back dazed, having actually swapped identities in an impacted data-surge of brains slapped against skull-walls. As their eyes clear they behold each other, horrified, heads moving slowly from side to side. Aghast each man stares at himself, who stares back aghast. In another life Ironlung handled classrooms of behaviourally disordered children. We don't want nobody jumping off the stage here, he advises, or somebody's gonna break their ass on my fucking dick. The bouncers here at the Middle East are to be complimented on their psychological insight—taken singly, each pit-person looks like he is having a very private and passionate tantrum, much in the manner of a raging two year-old boy who really longs only for (as the jargon has it) "containment" i.e. an adult to hold him. And so it is that these bouncers, when they detect a little too much frenzy in those milling arms, or a touch of needle in that flying bodyblock, will move in and grip the offender about with tough dad-like bouncer arms and words of calm whispered hotly in the ear. It works everytime: the pit-people look almost drunk with love when it happens to them, and flail off in grinning delirium. Hard to contain people though when the riff bores down at the end of "Gibbeted Captain Kidd" —they gibbeted him that's what they did—rotating like a mighty drillbit and hurling off clods. The baseball cap flies off the guitarist's head and and he is curiously diminished by the loss of it, as if we'd actually been imagining that behind that foam cap-front was a bloody great escarpment of headbanging bone. They all play like cavemen, jaws working, eyes piggy with animal focus, striking hoary agonistic rock poses like men buried alive under lava. The guitarist (forenamed Jay) takes a lead now and again, breaking bluesily off the rhythm and then rising into tweaked carollings that recall the immaculate squeal of the Buttholes' Paul Leary, that sound of music escaping gravity. Kevin the drummer has done sessions with various big names. They say he toured with Pat Benatar, and I don't care if that's true or not—this is a band that should be surrounded by rumours, by reverberant inflations and outright lies. I do so admire the drummer who can play with a cig jammed into his face, eyes crunched against the smoke and imparting a wizened runic look as the drumsticks flicker about the enhanced jawline—it's a tremendous defiance of comfort, this, a real gesture. The drummer from Milligram does it too, and at this point I exhort all readers in the Boston area to check out Milligram immediately because they will MC5 your arse right out of bed. As for Scissorfight—what can I say? This is high density. Sonically complete and conceptually perfect. The hag Fortune beckons. May they squander their mighty destiny truffling through the coke-piles. May they wander in a jungle blindness beneath hanging gardens of groupies. So be it.