Listening Party: Matt Young and PanaCea

Here’s the gimmick: Each week, we’ll pick two local bands — an opening act and a headliner — link to a site where you can listen to their songs for free, then ask you to spend a few moments of your precious time to tell us what you think about them. Some may be great, others may be mediocre or awful — that’s for you to decide — all we ask is that you listen with an open mind.

Opening Act: Matt Young

On an almost continual basis, I’m surprised at how little attention the Spartanburg hip-hop scene has gotten in the local media. I’ve written about this before, but there are tons of interesting rappers, DJs and producers based in Sparkle City, yet it seems that almost none of them have been noticed by the local tastemakers. The hip-hop community here is huge, prolific and vital, yet it’s still overwhelmingly underground, seemingly in an effort to fly just under the radar of anyone who would shut it down.

It’s so underground, in fact, that even the handbills I’ve found — little slips of paper intended to bring people out to shows — regularly fail to actually mention the location of the venue. That’s astonishing to me. What’s even more astonishing is that a city that’s desperately trying to define it’s cultural relevance is either wholly ignorant or decidedly non-supportive of it’s most immediately marketable cultural product: a glowing hot hip-hop scene.

In the right hands, a dedicated hip-hop venue and recording label based in Spartanburg could contribute millions to the tax base.

I guess the only reason this hasn’t happened yet is that there’s still a fear — perhaps understandable — that a recognition of hip-hop culture could mean more attention placed on the crime, poverty and general oppression Spartanburg’s black population currently deals with on a daily basis. Black somehow means “dangerous,” while white somehow means safe. There’s no easily-crossed bridge in place between these culturally segregated communities.

Or is there?

Rapper Matt Young is hardly a poster-child for hip-hop. In fact, he looks like a stereotypical white frat boy. And yet Young may have recorded Spartanburg’s best stab at a hip-hop anthem. I’m talking about his recently released song “That’s My City.”

Yeah, that’s my city
but the sparkle’s burning out
it ain’t looking too pretty

Fuck the gov’ment
taking money from the broke ones
we say what we feel
we can’t afford to food the choke on

Yeah, I want you to know that I’m average
nothing special, just dreaming like the average
and even though I’m on these speakers blasting
I feel the same things at these times that are tragic

I know how you feel, I’m living rock bottom
Me and Pete scrapping metal, living on ramen
These problems solved if we get a few dollars
Couple of forties well-worth not having to think about tomorrow

And tomorrow it will be the same thing
Will it ever change, rapid change, just to trim the pain
I’m tired of making songs about shit I hate
‘Cause I’m no better than a man who feels he can’t pay

And even though we goin’ down
That’s my city
And even though we broke now
That’s my city
Can’t afford to choke now
‘Cause that’s my city
Spartanburg, S.C.
Sparkle, that’s my city

While I won’t say that this is poetry, or that Matt Young is breaking new lyrical ground with this song, it’s hard to deny that he’s definitely capturing a side of Spartanburg that’s being overlooked by most of the musicians in town.

Young’s other music is a bit more on the club side, and it’s not exactly as powerful or as relevant. Still, if one white hip-hop artist with one relevant song helps to erode the wall separating Spartanburg’s musical cultures even a little, it’s well worth a listen.

Headliner: PanaCea

American metal music was in a strange place when I was teenager. In the very early 1990s, saying “metal” to almost anyone instantly summoned the image of the overblown, day-glo-tights-clad terrors of the overtly commercial hair-metal movement. Today, people may look upon bands like Poison as legends, but to a kid just getting into popular music in the grunge era, they were a campy joke.

But there were still “real” metal bands to be found, and you didn’t even have to look that hard. MTV, not yet the station where drunken co-eds were most likely to make out with each other in hot-tubs, was still mostly videos. And since metal was still the sound of the angry white teen — it seems like all you had to do to sell a metal album was imply that it would annoy one’s parents — MTV played a lot of it. (It would shortly be replaced by gangsta rap, largely due to the excellent marketing of Dr. Dre’s Death Row label to the white mainstream.)

We had Metallica, who had yet to toss their chips in with the RIAA, and was still the definition of anti-establishment snarl. We had Megadeth, who knew how to make a song to kick things to, and we had Ministry, who made you want to start a riot and tear down the world (if only because your dad was such a jerk sometimes). We even had Iron Maiden and Pantera, who completely sidestepped most of the pop culture trends of the ’80s and managed to stay relevant. But even those guys were of the old guard.

And on the very outskirts of the metal movement were three very different bands: Proto-grunge group Soundgarden, which was always more of an alternative metal band than anything else; Tool, which was at very cutting edge of what would later be called “progressive metal”; and Crowbar, which made syrup-thick metal which was largely about being very, very frustrated.

Why am I going on about all this 1990s-era metal stuff in a review of a local metal band? Because, unless I’m very much mistaken, Spartanburg-based PanaCea was listening to the same music I was in the last decade of the 20th century.

The absolute first thing you’ll notice about PanaCea’s sound is that they borrow heavily from many of the most relevant metal bands of the early 1990s. Don’t believe me? Here’s a simple test: Listen to the first thirty seconds of their song “Savior” and try to describe what you hear without referring to either Tool, Soundgarden or Crowbar. I’m not entirely sure it can be done, at least with any accuracy.

And that’s not a bad thing.

In fact, for someone like me, PanaCea’s sound is more-or-less perfect. It’s a brand of music that, to my ears at least, doesn’t bother with the trappings of the “hardcore” metal movement of the last decade, a sound I’ve only reluctantly learned to appreciate for the purposes of writing music reviews.

Does this mean that PanaCea is playing it safe by sticking to the trappings of a sound that, in the metal community as large, sound quite dated? Perhaps. Then again, today’s pop music is dominated by acts that borrow heavily — or even steal outright — from the pop music of the last three decades.

But I’d don’t get the sense that this is what PanaCea is doing. If anything, they’re trying to bring some of the better elements of that early ’90s sound — the melancholy vocals, the moody basslines, the overall lack of theatrical rage — back into the musical conversation.

Listening to the song “33033,” for instance, there’s practically no sense that the band is putting on any particularly affectation. It’s a heavy, deeply bittersweet song, but it seems to come from a very honest place. There’s no deep-throated screaming or needless thrash moments to showcase that the guitarist knows how to make a lot of noise. Instead, it’s a song that knows exactly what it’s about, knows exactly what story it’s trying to tell, and gets there without feeling the need to bellow “WE ARE SO METAL” in the process. It’s a fundamentally solid song.

There are some things about PanaCea that aren’t perfect, of course. Singer Wes Huntsinger doesn’t have the most versatile voice you’ll ever hear, for instance, although that’s hardly unusual for metal vocalists. Their lyrics are perfectly serviceable for their genre, but for the most part they’re nothing mind-blowing either.

Their biggest strength is also something of a weakness, since it’s very hard to listen to their music and not find yourself playing “What famous 1990s band did they borrow that riff/breakdown/phrasing from?” They don’t borrow too directly from any one specific band or song, but I think it’s fair to say they do borrow quite a lot from many different sources.

That said, I’ve personally enjoyed listening to PanaCea. At least part of the reason for this is that I don’t have to work to enjoy what I hear. Nostalgia is part of it, I’m sure, but so is their ability to write and record a good, solid metal song.

Now, it’s your turn. I’ve put my views out here on the digital page, but you can correct, amend, disagree, refute and rebut any and all of it by commenting in the field below. Notice something about the bands that I missed? Write a comment. I’ve had my say, now it’s all about you.