Receiving the Evcharist is our weekly feature where we pair choice albums with our favorite libations.  Drink from the cup of heresy.  This week’s offering: One Thousand Birds’ Rehearsal Tour Demo and Rogue Brewing Company’s Cold Brew IPA.  

The Metal: One Thousand Birds’ Rehearsal Tour Demo

If you’re a regular reader of my columns, you’ll know I’m interested in all kinds of weird and heavy music, both in and out of the confines of metal, but this is the first time I think I’ve ever talked about my love of skramz on this site.  Tank my underground cred all you want, but I cut my teeth as an emo kid in high school and it’s the one thing I’ll never give up; as my tastes in music got heavier and heavier, I drifted from the melodrama of pop-punk into the world of early aughts screamo, the heart-on-your-sleeve, visceral sound hitting home immediately.  So when I found out about Milwaukee, WI’s One Thousand Birds (after their performance at the highly acclaimed House of First Light showcase in New York) and their brand of self-described blackened screamo, it felt like two halves of my life fitting perfectly into place.  Released last week, the band’s second offering Rehearsal Tour Demo shows that this amalgamation of seemingly contradictory styles is anything but a gimmick.  The frantic energy, shredded vocals, and melodic senses of skramz is woven into the framework of raw black metal to create something anxious, at times sinister, and utterly captivating, particularly on the closing number “Tautening the Reigns of My Spirit”.  This tape runs just shy of only eight minutes, but the impression it makes in its short time is profound.  This band deserves to be huge.

The Booze: Rogue Brewing Company’s Cold Brew IPA

Similar to the odd-sounding combination of black metal and skramz, today in our glass we have an IPA brewed with cold brew coffee from Oregon’s Rogue Brewing Company.  The aptly self-titled drink is a study in contrasting bitterness.  The sharp bitterness of the generous amount of hops added here is by offset a duller bitter coffee flavor that hits in the aftertaste, making for an interesting push/pull on the tastebuds.  Balancing out the bitterness and accentuating the coffee flavor are coffee malts and oats, which also serve to give a nice smooth body to the drink.  I’ll admit to being skeptical the more I see the combination pop-up, but the more coffee IPA’s I try, the more the pairing seems to make sense to me, and this is certainly one of the better ones of the style I’ve had.

That wraps up another week then.  I’ll catch you all on the flip side.  Until then,

Cheers, and be good to each other,

– Vincent