Bucket List Shows: The Bands I Need to See

I'm fortunate to live in Chicago, a city that has a staggering number of music venues across all shapes and sizes, including multiple joints that pull in a terrific number of metal bands.  Rare is the tour that misses Chicago, and even then, there's a 99% chance the band is playing Milwaukee, which is a short drive north.  Like I said, fortunate.  That said, occasionally there are shows I miss out on, for any number of reasons, and that makes me sad; I love seeing bands live, and I love seeing bands I love live even more.  In thinking about some of the gnarly concerts coming up, I started thinking about the bands I've missed over the years, and came up with my ten "Bucket List" bands, the bands I most want to see before I shuffle off this mortal coil (hopefully not anytime soon).  I stayed away from bands that have broken up (or Isis would have made the list) or older bands whose members aren't going to do it (same for Pink Floyd).  A few honorable mentions before we get this show on the road: Tool, Meshuggah, Lamb of God, Anathema, Sleep.  All would be amazing to see, but they don't quite crack the Top Ten.  So... here goes!

Sunn O))) & Ulver - Terrestrials

Full-on band collaborations seem to be a rarity in extreme music these days.  Splits don't count, as typically those aren't collaborations but merely each band releasing their material on one side of an album.  Sometimes you'll see lone musicians combine talents, like Steven Wilson and Mikael Akerfeldt's Storm Corrosion, or a vocalist will embark upon a different project with other musicians, like Chino Moreno of Deftones joining Isis (R.I.P.) for Palms, but rarely do you see the full creative process of two bands working together to create something unique.  So it was definitely exciting when late last year I caught word of a long-gestating project between mysterious drone titans Sunn O))) and chameleonic metal band Ulver.  Sunn O))) has long been a favorite of mine for their intense, suffocatingly oppresive ambience, and while I'm not as familiar with Ulver, I knew that they were a band that began with a black metal album before moving through genres and mixing things up, never content to stagnate.  Two bands that place full emphasis on creating music that appeals to them, with seemingly little to no regard for commercial or critical success, working together... why yes please, I WOULD like to listen to that!  Terrestrials, the album that resulted from the bands' collaboration, is a breathtakingly dense album that is content to move glacially for most of it's thirty-five minute runtime, but when it opens up, it rewards the listeners who traversed the audio fog.