After Eyes Are Gone smashes through local music scene

Spokane will always have a soft spot for hard, fast metal.

That’s why bands such as After Eyes Are Gone can continue to send their sonic wrecking ball crashing through the local music scene.

After Eyes Are Gone’s quick, catchy and piercingly hypnotic-melodic Gothenburg metal ain’t for the faint of heart. Part-sophisticated, part-sophomoric, demonic scream-heavy vocals and crushingly anthemic guitar lines give After Eyes a polarizing effect that can push off as many as it sucks in. And that’s just fine by them.

“If it’s too much, they can leave,” said guitarist Joe Vitt.

But if you plan to stay, make sure you bring earplugs to their upcoming shows: Saturday night at Mootsy’s, 406 W. Sprague, with Embarrassing Bruises and Death Kills Time ($4 cover), and Monday night at The Detour, 175 S. Monroe, with old-school dual guitar, Philadelphia metal band Wastoid and local abrasive faves Pathos ($5 cover).

After Eyes Are Gone – the one-two guitar punch of Vitt and Jason Anderson, bassist and screamer Dave Brezinski, and supertight drummer Travis Hottinger – is a meshing of ex-members from Intifada and Bell 47.

It swaps out Intifada’s hardcore punk overdrive and clean vocals for Iron Maiden-esque guitar metal and unrelenting banshee-shriek vocals. The name was taken from a line in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” the book, not the movie.

“The definition changes. Our lyrics are about stuff you read about in the paper: home invasion, rape, murder and how people treat each other. If people were blind, they wouldn’t be able to judge each other on how they dress or race,” Vitt said. “The world would be different.”

For After Eyes Are Gone, the first hump of the live show is getting the crowd into it.

“We play rowdy music,” Vitt said. “After they have been drinking a few, people get into that.”

The quartet recently finished a four-song untitled EP. It’s dark in subject matter but eerily pleasing in aesthetics. Song titles include “Dying Secret,” “Coma Dose” and “Pros and Cons of Murder,” a song about a friend who murdered someone two years ago.

“It really hurt me personally that he would do something like that. I don’t hang out with killers. That was the end of my childhood. I was 18 or 19, and I felt invincible. I learned that people can make horrible decisions that you can’t take back. It opened my eyes to what real life is all about,” Brezinski said.