Dark Days Bright Nights delivered a weekend of heavy music and community

It’s easy to get cynical about music festivals. God knows I did. As a younger person I had a rosier outlook; seeing a bunch of my favorite bands all in the same place on one weekend—what’s not to like? It only took having my brain melt in 100-degree heat at Coachella 2004 to question whether or not I actually enjoyed festivals, but even since then, the experience has changed a lot. The escalating sense of spectacle has made it all the more difficult to outdo what’s already been done, and in the process, the price of attending just keeps going up. And frankly, I’m just not at a place in my life where seeing Tame Impala perform with Gorillaz is worth all the trappings.

But a few hours into the first night of Dark Days Bright Nights in Richmond, Virginia, following a series of mutual expressions of appreciation among the bands, organizers and audience, and too many “we love you”s to count, it became immediately obvious that this was a different kind of music festival. To be fair, I expected as much going into it, the three-day event at The Broadberry featuring a lineup of hardcore, metal, screamo and noise rock bands almost all of whom are linked—either through Persistent Vision or Yr Screaming Youth Records, shared lineups, tourmates or proximity, given that a considerable helping of bands (Pageninetynine, Inter Arma, Infant Island, Prisoner) hailed from the Virginia/D.C. area. But even with feedback shrieking and a pit in constant motion, the vibes at Dark Days were off the charts.

Created and organized by Paul Hansberger, founder of Persistent Vision, and Mike Taylor, guitarist in Pageninetynine and founder of Yr Screaming Youth, Dark Days Bright Nights was inspired in part by Richmond’s history of underground punk, and at times it felt a little like being at an extremely well run DIY show with air conditioning and waffle fries. No sets overlapped, so if you wanted to see all 25 bands, you could. And for eclectic listeners of heavy music, just about everything was worth seeing—which included a lot of bands where, even if you wanted to see them in the last, oh, five to 25 years, you wouldn’t have had the opportunity.

Knoxville, Tennessee’s The Red Scare played their first show in 23 years on Saturday night, burning through a set of post-hardcore bashers that carried a groove that occasionally took on a kind of aggressive hypnosis—made all the cooler by virtue of vocalist Kip Uhlhorn chewing gum through their set, like a screamo Link Wray. Pygmy Lush, a slowcore group featuring members of Pageninetynine, likewise performed for the first time onstage in seven years, a fact that they pointed out just before settling into their melancholy cycles of strum and drone. Despite the occasional presence of a squealing amp, it was gorgeous in the manner of Songs: Ohia’s starker work—but with a lot more guitars.

Then again, some of the highlights of the weekend were bands I hadn’t personally spent much time with prior to having my face blown off. Austin, Texas’ Porcelain was one, their debut released earlier this year through Portrayal of Guilt’s own label, and their live set rife with muscular yet accessible noise rock that echoed some of the ’90s-era triumphs of bands like Unwound in their early years. Fórn was another, a Boston sludge/doom band that comfortably kept well under 100 BPMs in their misanthropic churn, but whose set arced toward more fascinating frontiers, ending on a new song that found groove beyond what rumbles from beneath.

Granted, a lot of bands offered exactly what I expected and/or wanted them to, from the soaring post-metal of Glassing to the blackened screamo surge of Portrayal of Guilt, the blistering hardcore of NØ Man (also one of the most animated as well as the most sobering in their reminders of the ongoing massacre in Gaza), or the elegantly crushing post-hardcore of Kowloon Walled City. Each band occupying a different place on the spectrum of loud, intense music represented throughout the festival, each one delivering a memorable set through face-shredding intensity or moments of pin-drop stillness.

I’d be lying if I said that two of the biggest reasons for me being there weren’t Thou and Inter Arma, however—bands I’ve seen before (Inter Arma eight times, Thou only twice), but who I’ll take every opportunity to do so again in the future. And it took only one song in each bands’s set to be reminded of that fact, each of them among the most consistently interesting bands in metal in the 21st century, not to mention absolutely ferocious live acts. Thou leaned heavy on songs from their recently released Umbilical, an album with the kind of energy that great live shows are made of, particularly the blistering “I Feel Nothing When You Cry,” which closed their set with a blazing intensity. Likewise, Inter Arma split the difference between epic and searing, whether galloping through New Heaven highlight “Violet Seizures” or dusting off the folk-tinged black metal of “The Long Road Home.” (For reasons I won’t get into, I wasn’t able to catch Soul Glo’s set, but by all accounts they seemed to play a ripper of a set on Saturday night.)

And then there was Pageninetynine. Holy fuck. I wasn’t an early adopter of screamo in my younger years, and this Sterling, Virginia band broke up well before I knew who they were. I imagine an alternate timeline where I theoretically could have seen them at the Che Cafe in 2002, and yet I come up empty in trying to imagine how the full band of nine members—two vocalists, two bassists, four guitarists(!) and a drummer—would have fit on that plywood stage. Even at the Broadberry, the overall effect was one of just slightly controlled chaos, their whirlwind intensity a breathtaking spectacle that made this rare performance one worth waiting for. Absolutely bonkers.

And yet, as practitioners of such satisfyingly violent music, they took the stage in a group huddle and made a statement about how “heartwarming” it was to see everyone come together and share the experience over the past three days. And most of the bands that performed said something similar, a feeling that prevailed despite the intensity and the darkness that dominated throughout the weekend. People talk about “community” in music as a kind of nebulous concept, but here—where all the bands and labels involved all genuinely supported each other and embodied the ideals we so often hear in the abstract in punk and DIY spaces—it seemed to apply. No ego, no spectacle other than just playing absolutely crushing sets. I can’t tell you how refreshing that is.

In a statement prior to the event, Taylor said, “My hope is that we can make a memory of a lifetime for some young kid at our fest.” I’m sure that happened, or at least I hope it did. But I know this much: It was enough to make this weathered critic let go of his cynicism for a weekend and be reminded of just how fun live music can be.

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