For three years, Chicago thrash band Texas Toast Chainsaw Massacre have been booking DIY shows that combine sets from up-and-coming local metal, hardcore, and punk bands with body-slamming, table-trashing brawls. On Saturday, October 28, at a Pilsen DIY venue whose name I can’t share here (“Ask a punk,” as they say), TTCM present the 11th installment in their Toastamania series, named in tribute to the WrestleMania ladder matches that helped inspire it. Sometimes they actually do use a ladder, but they’re just as likely to whomp one another with foil steam-table pans, bust up hollow-core doors, or dive through folding tables. Somebody in TTCM might wear the championship belt, basically daring a challenger to remove it somehow, but sometimes the band will just throw it into the crowd and set off a free-for-all.
In 2015, TTCM got some tips from their drummer at the time, whose dad had been a wrestler in the 90s. Newly confident that they could pull off a few spectacular moves without injuring themselves (well, spectacular for a DIY hardcore show), they introduced the pro-wrestling element to Toastamania. Attendance skyrocketed.
Death of Self plan to play material from their forthcoming album, Look Elsewhere, because they’re pretty sure the Halloween Havok crowd won’t have heard it before. This will also be the first Toastamania for XEUTHANIZEDX, whose rowdy crowds have earned them a certain notoriety already—I know of three people who’ve broken their noses during the band’s sets, whether in the pit or via an accidentally collision with somebody’s headstock. Evil Warning and Info Wars will make their live debuts at this show, and Carnivora is returning to Chicago for the first time since this past spring.
