Dead City Sessions brings unrelenting metal bands back to Fairborn Phoenix

The next Dead City Sessions, a night of unrelenting metal bands at the Fairborn Phoenix, is Saturday, Sept. 13. The lineup includes Daywalker, Black Spot, Obsidian Mind, Until the Dead Walk, and Full Nelson. Five bands, one stage, zero mercy. Consider it a pit summons.

Dead City Sessions spawned out of Dead City Film Festival, which is both a film festival and music showcase hosted at the theater. Dead City Sessions, however, is strictly about the music.

The event will also be filmed and live streamed.

Formed in Cincinnati’s diverse metal scene, Daywalker has been around off and on for six years now. I talked with singer Greg Gonzales ahead of the show, to reflect on the band’s first Dead City appearance, and to delve into how metal makes an impact in small towns.

“There was a lot of kids, a lot of energy, a lot of movement,” Gonzales said. “Things we never expected before. It was the first time we played in Fairborn, and it was really exciting.”

Gonzales said all-ages mini festivals like Dead City Sessions are special for the youth in particular, considering the affordability for the experience they get. The kind of energy a band like Daywalker brings, the style of music and atmosphere, is palpable.

Daywalker — a fusion of punk, underground hardcore, and nu metalcore — makes “stress relieving tunes for bad times.” It pulls from the ferocity of Lamb of God and Slayer, with thrash influences from Anthrax and Testament.

What attracts Gonzales to hardcore music?

“The energy, the kids, the message, just the art of it,” he said. “The whole level of being something different. It comes across as more honest and real, and it talks to the youth. When people eventually pick up on the lyrics and they understand the content of it, they understand the messages of the songs.”

Despite the overwhelmingly aggressive screams and distorted guitars that typically occupy hardcore music, a surprising amount of it is actually about being a good role model. Sometimes a song may come across as mere yelling, but sitting down with the expressive lyrics, you’ll see that they often motivate and promote a positive lifestyle — more so than what “normal songs,” as Gonzales put it, do.

Take Daywalker’s song “Black Cloud.” Lyrics like “Your thunder can’t scare us / Your rain won’t drown us out” and “We will not surrender” lead up to the listener hearing that he’s “Fighting to the end” and is “Unbreakable.”

“Don’t let your demons rule you,” Gonzales said. “You rule your demons.”

This writer originally came from a small town in Northwest Ohio. There, a hearty metal scene thrived in basements and union halls, just as it does in a fair amount of smaller towns around the Midwest, Fairborn included. Gonzales purports that it’s a “sense of danger,” a want to create a different experience within those communities that contributes to those metal scenes.

“The people who listen to the radio or listen to their parents’ kind of music, they’re just tired of the same old,” he said. “There’s more music than just the pop feel, than the regular basic song. Hardcore and punk, it’s like, Okay, there is somebody speaking my language.”

As band descriptors for second Dead City Sessions include words like “aggressive,” “sinister,” and “hardcore fury delivered with pure force,” it’s safe to say attendees may want to prepare for a rager, for the second official wall of death.

Earplugs optional. Courage required.

HOW TO GO