Courtesy Paco Marcos
Audio By Carbonatix
Heavy metal isn’t mainstream, especially in 2023. Gone are the days of meteoric rock star rises, God-like frontmen and sold-out stadium tours. The ’80s, five decades ago now (feel old?), was really the last time the genre dominated the airwaves and pop culture, thanks to the excessive and wild ways of glam metal and such groups as MÁ¶tley Crüe and Poison (which are on a stadium tour together this year, by the way). Since then, the ever-evolving genre has been relegated to a headbanging stereotype. But heavy metal endures, and it’s far from dead or irrelevant.
Bryce R. VanHoosen, guitarist of Portland’s Silver Talon, still calls heavy metal “the most important music that’s out there,” even if it isn’t as lucrative as it once was. At this point, it’s more of a lifestyle for a lot of people, as he sees it.
“In metal, as opposed to pop or Top 40 radio or something like that, there’s a legitimate artistry there,” he says ahead of a tour with death-metal mainstays Cynic and Atheist that comes to the Oriental Theater on Saturday, June 24.
“A lot of the bands and folks involved in this stuff, we’re not really doing it for the money; we’re not really doing it for some high-achievement kind of career,” VanHoosen continues. “Let’s be real: Nobody’s going to give Silver Talon a Grammy. If we wanted to make money, we could just be Wall Street investment bankers or some shit like that and not play this music that is way too hard and way too complicated for the average listener and player. … There’s no money, no fame and no glory here, but I’m going to dive into this. This is my identity, like it or not.”
Although the band officially came together in 2017, Silver Talon is a throwback to the genre’s pinnacle, when Judas Priest and King Diamond (two more bands that are still on the road) were regularly melting faces off with high-pitched vocals and dual-guitar attacks. While Silver Talon very well could have opened for either of those acts if it had been around back then, instead, VanHoosen, vocalist Wyatt Howell, guitarist Devon Miller, bassist Walter Hartzell and drummer Michael Thompson are more like time travelers, playing a style of power metal that Headbangers Ball would be proud to share with the metal-mad masses of yesteryear.
It’s that “legacy that’s really attractive to people,” VanHoosen says.
“If somebody asks, ‘What heavy metal album should I listen to?’ It’s like, ‘Oh, listen to Black Sabbath‘s Master of Reality.’ It’s an album that’s old enough to be our dads’ age at this point. This album can have a mortgage and five kids. It’s old as hell,” he says of the seminal 1971 album. “But I don’t know if I necessarily see mainstream-pop fans doing the same thing, like, ‘Oh, yeah, that album from the ’70s? I’m going to go listen to that.'”
While the foundation of Silver Talon is built on the classics, VanHoosen notes that the band is also pulling from another 1980s subgenre to construct a more dynamic sound: ’80s New York hardcore. “That has been a big influence on the newer stuff we’re doing,” he says, referring to Silver Talon’s 2022 Cro-Mags cover of “The Only One.”
“We’ve really been diving headfirst into all of that stuff and the intricacies of the world of Cro-Mags and taking to heart their third album, Alpha Omega,” he explains. “It’s almost like proggy hardcore. There’s a lot of cool stuff on that record that you can extrapolate a little bit and add it into the whole proggy, heavy-metal stuff.”
And being from the Pacific Northwest also lends Silver Talon an affinity for grunge. The group shared a rendition of “We Die Young,” by Alice In Chains, last year. “I don’t know if it’s the weather, because it’s rainy nine months out of the year, but there’s always this darker, depressed thing going on” with Northwest bands, VanHoosen notes. “We take that and are inspired by that as well.”
With a name inspired by the Sumerian demon Anzû, a man-lion-eagle monster that was hell-bent on becoming the ruler of the known universe back then, Silver Talon’s lyrics cover everything from demonology to Terminator on its first two albums, Becoming a Demon (2018) and Decadence and Decay (2021).
“It’s just whatever we feel, anything that can catch our attention. That [could have] to do, obviously, with your standard heavy-metal monster bullshit like Judas Priest does, like devil machines and silver dragons. Becoming a Demon was a little bit more in that vein, where we were finding our footing, like, ‘Well, what do we write about?'” VanHoosen explains. “Decadence and Decay was expanding beyond that. It got a little bit more philosophical in the writing. There’s still a lot of heavy-metal monster stuff going on. We have a song about Terminator, for God’s sake. But we really wanted to talk more about not just the existence of this thing, but what it means existentially from a philosophical standpoint.”
Looking toward the future, VanHoosen says the newer music incorporates all of that, but with more of the aforementioned New York hardcore ethos.
“Those guys would just write about anything,” he says. “Like, somebody pisses you off or whatever, and you just write a song about it.”
Silver Talon, 8 p.m. Saturday, June 24, Oriental Theater, 4335 West 44th Avenue. Tickets are $25.
