Album Review | 'Live Noise' 

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For more than 20 years, Sulaco has remained a heavy musical force. The metal band never fit neatly into one category.

Sulaco partly owes its versatility to Lon Hackett, the longtime bass player known as “Spoth.” Hackett’s crunch provided an oceanically deep low end, upping Sulaco’s heaviness. After Hackett died in 2023, the band shared two final, intense songs written with him: “Vacant” and “Funeral Suit.”

Months before Hackett’s passing, on October 12, 2022, Sulaco stopped by Bar Bad Ending, then still called Rosen Krown, for an improvisatory set of sheer wild noise during Rochester Experimental Week. A strategically placed phone captured Sulaco’s howling show, which the band released as “Live Noise” on July 16.

“It was the only time we've done this in front of a crowd and not in our jam room,” drummer Chris Golding (“Crif”) wrote to accompany the music. (Golding works at WXXI.) The bravery of abandoning its tight songs in favor of making an unplanned clamor pays off. “Live Noise” is a triumphant swirl of chaos that celebrates the alchemy of musical exploration.


Joining Golding and Hackett are guitarists Erik Burke and Brian Mason and the group’s vocalist, Jason Leone, who offers textural samples. Much of the 21-minute performance sounds like airy menace — poking around in the dark to find the light switch.

Midway through, Golding and Hackett lock into a powerful groove. “It felt like magic that night,” Golding wrote. That moment is a conquest, a lens snapping a muddied scene into sharp focus.

Thus the promise of improvised noise jams is fulfilled: “I don’t know where we’re going, but I’ll tell you when we get there.”

“Live Noise,” with its imperfect sound quality and sudden twists, embodies what former CITY writer Saby Reyes-Kulkarni once called Sulaco’s “audio invisible ink.” It’s a fitting send-off for a departed musical giant of Hackett’s stature.

Patrick Hosken is an arts writer at CITY. He can be reached at [email protected].