Rivers of Nihil live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 7 July 2018

Fifteen dollars bought a ticket to a headlining metal band from Pennsylvania on the first Saturday of July 2018. That sat near the floor of the year’s prices at Crocks. The band was Rivers of Nihil, out on a tour built around Where Owls Know My Name, a record that had been in shops for less than four months.

Rivers of Nihil formed in 2009 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Their first two albums, The Conscious Seed of Light in 2013 and Monarchy in 2015, came out on Metal Blade Records, the label that also released the third. Press around the new album filed it under progressive death metal, and that is still the usual description.

Where Owls Know My Name

Where Owls Know My Name came out on 16 March 2018 and entered the Billboard 200 at number 61, on first-week sales of 2,750 copies. It also reached number 50 on the Canadian albums chart. Metal Blade’s tour announcement quoted writers calling it one of the year’s best metal albums so far, the kind of line a label puts on a poster.

Carson Slovak and Grant McFarland produced it, and it was recorded at Atrium Audio. Earlier in 2018 the band had played Texas Independence Fest in Austin, so the Canadian run was one stretch of a busy year for a new record.

The lineup named in the announcement was Jake Dieffenbach on vocals, Brody Uttley and Jon Topore on guitars, Adam Biggs on bass and backing vocals, and Jared Klein on drums. Klein, who came from a band called The Kennedy Veil, had drummed on the album, so the group on the road matched the group on the record.

The route

The dates ran from Portland, Maine, on 28 June to Reading, Pennsylvania, on 19 July. The tour therefore finished in the band’s home town twelve days after Thunder Bay. Most of the dates were in Canada, and the run was billed as a Canadian headlining tour with select American shows.

It was announced in April 2018, so Thunder Bay was on the calendar for about eleven weeks before the night. Alterbeast and Inferi were announced as support across the tour. The Thunder Bay night itself was billed with the plain phrase “with guests”, and the local bill is not spelled out.

The schedule does show a straight westward step: Crocks on the Saturday, the Park Theatre in Winnipeg on the Sunday. Nothing else in the record falls within eleven days of it on either side. This Saturday stood alone.

What $15 meant

The price put the night at the bottom of the range. Among twelve 2018 shows with a price in this record, admission ran from $13 to $40, a spread of $27, and $15 was only two dollars above the cheapest night. The Faceless had cost $20 eighteen days earlier, and Sebastian Bach had cost $40 twelve days before this Saturday.

Three weeks after this night, on 28 July, The Acacia Strain asked $20 for another heavy bill. Anyone who bought a ticket to all three heavy nights spent $55 in total, $20 plus $15 plus $20, which was $15 more than the single Bach ticket.

Three heavy bands in six weeks

Seen from Crocks, the summer of 2018 had a run of loud, technical music. The Faceless came on 19 June, Rivers of Nihil on 7 July and The Acacia Strain on 28 July. Each was touring a record or an anniversary, and each played Thunder Bay first and Winnipeg next.

The three nights fell inside 39 days, and their prices stayed in a narrow band, $15 to $20. For a city of about 108,000 people on Lake Superior, that is a lot of heavy music in a single summer.

The cheapest heavy night was also the one with the newest album behind it, and $15 was a low price for a record that had charted in two countries.

Crocks was still on Cumberland Street South that July. In October the Crocks name moved to the building on Red River Road, and the rest of that summer and autumn is on the shows page.