Mursic: strange name, great band

The first time I heard Mursic was at a coffee shop in La Mesa. No, they weren’t performing there — Clay Hackett, a drummer, had saved some of their demo tracks to his iPad. He swore me to secrecy and handed me a pair of headphones. Then he switched on the first track, and from the very beginning, I knew I was in the hands of professionals. He could have told me it was Danny Elfman with Trent Reznor I was listening to, and I’d have believed him. Mursic, at that point, was a split-city studio project (half the band lives here, the other half lives in Los Angeles), and they were itching to book some shows. But I expressed doubt that they could execute onstage the sonic intricacies I’d just heard. This band can do just that, Hackett assured me. I cracked wise, comparing the name Mursic to the designation of a particular type of flesh-eating bacteria.

“Cool,” he said with a slight grin. “I think maybe that’s the point.”

Hackett, who specializes in heavy metal, finds himself in some thought-provoking bands. He first gained local attention with a hometown power quartet named Suicide Chords, possibly the only romance-metal band ever. When they imploded, Hackett became a free agent. This was right about the same time that Anthony Montemarano, Brian Rumsey, and Ezra Brodersen were looking for a fourth member. They needed a metal-head drummer who could play to a click track (necessary when a band uses pre-recorded backing tracks) and spark up their complex book of originals. Their self-titled debut CD is a theme park of ideas, from cabaret to all-out blast-furnace guitar-driven metal bedlam. They have a name for it: theatric-symphonic metal, and they hope to make their genre-bending mix of sounds not often heard in heavy metal into a common occurrence. Mursic: strange name, great band.