“WE’RE CREMATORY STENCH!”

Those aren’t the words you expect to come echoing through the marbled halls of Resorts World Las Vegas, past the fine-dining restaurants and upscale clothing stores, at 1 p.m. on a Sunday.

Yet on August 21, 2022, that gutturally roared announcement from Josey Aguilar, frontman for the so-named SoCal death metal band, felt strangely harmonious with the surroundings.

For the third time in its nomadic six-year history here, the heavy and trippy Psycho Las Vegas music festival invaded a different casino-resort. And perhaps more than ever before, it filled that space completely, from the Event Center at one end of the property to Ayu Dayclub at the other.

The Hard Rock Hotel (2016-2018) and Mandalay Bay (2019 and 2021) were solid sites for the three-day fest. But the former mostly confined the event to one of its wings, while the latter is so big, you might have walked through without realizing a black-shirted music gathering was even underway.

Not so at Resorts World. The year-old North Strip resort rolled out the blood-red carpet for Psycho’s attendees, making almost every potential performance space available—including the Dawg House Saloon and RedTail bars and the Famous Foods Street Eats court, loaded with Filipino duck tacos and Indian curries—to Psycho’s 150-plus acts and their fans.

Also to their credit, the host hotel, Psycho’s organizers and the weekend’s security staff allowed beverages to be taken into and out of its two main rooms—the Coachella tent-like Event Center and the third-floor Rose Ballroom—engendering goodwill among attendees who had already paid hundreds for tickets and hotel rooms. And Resorts World’s staff amplified that positive vibe with a welcoming attitude, bouncing back the overwhelmingly friendly nature of the crowd in attendance.

Walking from one end of the footprint to the other was something of a haul, but it’s tough grousing about a setup that allows one to soak in some funky psych from costumed Austin hippie tribe Golden Dawn Arkestra before plunging into the crushing black metal of Norwegian headliner Emperor.

Those sorts of musical segues dominated the weekend for anyone who wandered: the forceful post-hardcore of Austin’s …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead straight into the lyrical mastery of Wu-Tang Clan “head” The GZA; the twisted synths of Pittsburgh’s Tobacco setting up the wall-shaking sludge of veteran Japanese noise band Boris; and the crowd-invading artistry of LA’s Geneva Jacuzzi leading to the moshpit-inspiring thrash of Stu Folsom’s fast-rising Vegas band, SpiritWorld.

 

And Psycho 2022 featured memorable rarities, including Friday’s appearance by Norwegian black metal godfathers Mayhem and the first U.S. gig from iconic Denmark metal band Mercyful Fate in more than 20 years on Sunday.

Gripes? The main stage lagged behind Psycho’s previous two in production value, and was home to significant sound issues at points throughout the weekend. Some scheduling missed the mark, like putting The Black Angels and Warpaint in the way-too-large Event Center on Saturday, while At the Gates fans got shut out at the much-smaller Ayu Dayclub.

And if you dare to buy tickets for overseas acts in today’s COVID- and visa-challenged festival landscape, expect something big to drop off late in the game, in this case’s Norwegian metal outfit Ulver. Booking Wu-Tang’ers also remains risky, with Ghostface, Inspectah Deck and Method Man all dropping off along the way. But GZA held it down nicely for the Wu, playing his own set Friday, jumping in for Meth Sunday with Raekwon and politely destroying a parade of festgoers during an exhibition of chess earlier on the final day.

The fest also held poker and golf tournaments, but mostly it remains a gathering of serious music fans, who fly here to see their favorite acts, in an interesting environment. Resorts World certainly fit the bill for Psycho 2022.

And now, 10 of our favorite sets from the weekend, presented alphabetically …

Amenra (Sunday, Event Center) Catching the first main-stage act on the third day at any festival can be a challenge, and I began this Belgian metal band’s set sitting far from the stage to conserve energy. But as back-to-the-audience vocalist Colin H. Van Eeckhout and his mates built—and then released—the tension in their atmospheric compositions, I found myself drawn further and further to the front, where my body celebrated Amenra’s adventurous music without regard for what might come later in the day. –Spencer Patterson

Blood Incantation (Saturday, Rose Ballroom) Even frontman Paul Riedl expressed disappointment at missing the conflicting Bone Thugs-N-Harmony set on the main stage, but those of us who skipped that throwback hip-hop trip were rewarded handsomely by Denver’s death metal experts. Eschewing the instrumental ambience of its latest release, Blood Incantation played all four cuts off proggy 2019 LP Hidden History of the Human Race, drawing a sizable throng and serving notice it could play a much larger role at a future Psycho. –SP

Drain (Sunday, Rose Ballroom) Drain brought the hardcore “our stage is your stage” ethos to Psycho like it’s never seen before, especially at the end of the set where around 50 fans climbed up and stage-dove during the anthemic “California Cursed.” It’s a small miracle there were even enough people to catch all the flying bodies considering there were only a couple of rows of people at the front of the stage before a mosh pit stretched the next several yards. “Getting kicked in the head gave me life,” one man in a death metal tour shirt said after the Santa, California, outfit completed a short but explosive set that raged in a quick succession of two-minute punky, thrashy bursts. –Case Keefer

Elizabeth Colour Wheel (Friday, RedTail) It was difficult to know where to direct your eyes during an intense Friday-evening set from the chameleonic Boston band at RedTail. During one of their first songs, vocalist Lane Shi contorted her body in the back of the room while the band’s guitarist spun in a circle laying on the ground of the stage and the drummer screamed himself red in the face. Elizabeth Colour Wheel sounds like one of many bands cut from the Deafheaven-inspired blackgaze mold on record, but live, it’s something different all together—a self-destructive noise machine. –CK

Gatecreeper (Saturdaym Ayu Dayclub) At least one performance scheduled for Thursday night’s pool party at Ayu Dayclub got rained out, but it’s doubtful the venue ever got wetter than it did Saturday night during the Arizona death metal band’s set. Cannonballs, belly flops, flips and somersaults into the pool created a constant splash of water in every direction. It never fazed Gatecreeper, which brought its own barrage of crunchy but catchy riffs. The band even played a rare Psycho encore, a request frontman Chase Mason felt obliged to fulfill after a few fans answered an open call to jump into the pool with their clothes on during planned closer “Flamethrower.” –CK   

Liars (Sunday, Ayu Dayclub) More than 20 years after They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, Liars frontman Angus Andrew remains a force, capable of wowing crowds not just with his musical diversity but with his can’t-tear-your-eyes-away presence. The trio didn’t play anything off that debut LP but came relatively close, resurrecting “oldie” “There’s Always Room on the Broom” from forever-underrated second album They Were Wrong, So We Drowned to go with a collection of tunes drawn from last year’s The Apple Drop and its recent predecessors. Ayu was far from packed for this left-of-center performance, but it really should have been. –SP

Nothing (Friday, Rose Ballroom)  Vocalist/guitarist Domenic Palermo’s My Bloody Valentine/Smashing Pumpkins-indebted project hasn’t always been the sharpest live band, more concerned with deafening volume than subtle craft in its earlier days. A late-night Friday set at the Rose Ballroom showed that’s now in the past, however, as Nothing has gradually completed its transformation to a group perpetually seeming on the edge of collapse to one that has comfortably found its niche. The Philadelphia outfit had every second of its 45-minute performance down to a science this time, from samples it ran between songs to a beautifully sequenced setlist that touched on all parts of its discography. –CK

SpiritWorld (Sunday, RedTail) Watching them Sunday night at RedTail, it’s hard to believe the rising local collective led by Stu Folsom only fully transitioned from cowpunk to metal and solidified a full-band lineup two years ago. SpiritWorld sounded tighter than most of the established bands in their prime that played over the weekend and went harder with far more energy than virtually all of them, too. Folsom stalked side-to-side onstage with grade-A frontman swagger in between his headbanging and swaying bandmates, all of them memorably outfitted in full Western regalia like rhinestone blazers and Stetson hats. -CK

Wand (Friday, Rose Ballroom) Though frontman Cory Hanson didn’t seem entirely comfortable participating in a festival whose name he termed “ableist” (he twice instead referred to Psycho fest as “Crazy fest”), that didn’t stop him from locking in with drummer Evan Burrows to lead their LA quartet through a 20-plus-minute mid-set piece that found Wand foraying into everything from jazz’s freer side to the guitar-drum noise of Harry Pussy. On a weekend filled with fearless sonic exploration, that improvisational jam stood out. –SP

Warpaint (Friday, Event Center) So I went to a three-day metal fest and my favorite set was … Warpaint’s?! Much as I enjoyed all the heaviness of the weekend, this LA quartet’s art-pop main-stage performance was the fly in the ointment, the set that truly left me awestruck. I’d previously caught the group four times, but not since 2015, and those seven years have done wonders for Warpaint’s confidence. Every member of the band—guitarist/vocalist Emily Kokal, guitarist/vocalist Theresa Wayman, bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg and drummer Stella Mozgawa—contributed equally, both in musicianship and energy, as Warpaint proved that sometimes, when everyone zigs it’s best to zag, to a place of buoyancy and light, however un-Psycho that might seem. –SP