Queen of Crom: Funerals' Shy Kennedy talks Pittsburgh's ascendant metal fest

By Scott Mervis / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When Shy Kennedy was a kid, back in the ‘80s, her mom had a vast record collection acquired from her previous marriage and she was perfectly willing to share it with her young, curious daughter.

“She got me this Playskool record player,” Kennedy says. “It actually would play vinyl, but it was like a little plastic box and she just let me have it. She didn't even care. Like, I guess she didn't value it at all or whatever because I wouldn't let my 6-year-old play with my records.”

Growing up in the Mon Valley without a ton of friends or much to do, the young Kennedy would listen to pop, classic rock, blues — a whole variety of stuff.

“But I always was drawn to darker, heavier things,” she says. “It just always suited my mood more and it always felt like a release for me.”

When she was 8 or 9, her sister’s boyfriend introduced her to Van Halen, which led to Pink Floyd, which led to that doomy British band with Ozzy.

“When I first heard Black Sabbath, I was like, ‘Wow, this is awesome,’ and I just got into all manners of heavy,” she said.

She would pick stuff up at record stores and through Columbia House, sometimes based on whether the covers looked cool. That led to a few missteps, she says, like Meat Loaf. One day at a flea market in North Versailles, she found a life-changing album.

“There was this older guy who sat in the corner and he had all of these records,” she says. “It was all jazz and blues, but he had a corner where it was just miscellaneous stuff you'd pick up and I went into that area and I found ‘Blessed Are the Sick’ by Morbid Angel.

“I saw the artwork and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is cool.’ I think it was $2. I got it and I put it in my CD player at home and everything I knew in the world changed. I didn't know you could do this music. I didn't know you could be a heavy band and sound very classical, and so dark. To this day, it’s one of my favorite records of all time.

“So, the first real heavy band that changed my life after Black Sabbath, that was more like something my mom should worry about, was Morbid Angel.”

Now, at 44, Kennedy is one of the pillars of the Pittsburgh metal scene, fronting the doom metal band Funerals (a new spinoff of Horehound) and hosting Descendants of Crom, the festival she launched in 2017 that’s set to return Friday and Saturday at the Shred Shed in Allentown.

Crom VI will feature the return of Philly legends Stinking Lizaveta, who played the inaugural fest, along with the touring pair of Faerie Ring (Indiana) and Blessed Black (Cincinnati), Pillärs, Axioma and Slow Walk (all from Cleveland) and such Pittsburgh bands as Passover, Úzkost, The Long Hunt and Kennedy’s Funerals.

Pie in the sky

As a teenager into metal, Kennedy had no intentions of actually being in a band. She took piano lessons at Community College of Allegheny County, but says, “I never thought I could be a musician. I never thought I was good, or could be good. It was just like some kind of internal fear or something.”

She edged into the scene by taking photos and writing reviews for the CCAC paper and then Da’Core magazine, run by Eric Corbin (now of Screaming Crow Tattoo), and FAQ.

Back then, the metal scene was even more of an iffy place for a woman.

“If you were at a show in the ‘90s, early 2000s, sometimes even now it happens, somebody starts talking to you and they're like, ‘Where's your boyfriend?’ They just assume you're there supporting [someone],” Kennedy says.

When she was 20 she had the “pie-in-the-sky” idea to launch her own website, Metalheads. In those years, she interviewed Henry Rollins, Cannibal Corpse, Phil Anselmo and Clutch, among others.

“Before I even had a car I would take a bus up to New England Hardcore [and] Metal Fest and shoot on my own and get a hotel room on my own, and do all these things. And people were like, ‘Are you crazy?’ But I always felt independent in the scene. So every time I went to a show, it was almost always by myself — until I had, like, a peer group of people that I met that would go to shows with me later on.”

After a few years with no income from it, she “burned out” on the magazine idea.

Her path to the stage came via Chuck Owston, the local psych-rocker with a Viking aura who was her preacher when she was in late teens. Owston, recalling her vocal talent, reached out to her via Myspace to invite her into his band, Bonfire Night.

“It was like a Celtic rock band and he was trying to make it a little bit more doomier and heavier, a little bit more dramatic,” she says. “So, I ended up singing backup vocals and playing tambourine. I didn't stay too long with them, probably like a year and a half. It just wasn't working out for me. It wasn't my vibe, but it was a good experience.”

She did a short stint with the band The Evil Machine before venturing into a solo noise project called o Heiðrún, which spawned her noise label Blackseed Records.

In 2015, she answered a Craigslist ad from members of a band called Perish looking for a singer. A few auditions and writing sessions later, they formed Horehound, named for a medicinal herb. The sound was doom to sludge topped by her combination of pure, pretty vocals and menacing growls. Horehound released three albums before splitting this year and forming Funerals with a new guitarist.

In managing the operations for Horehound, she became adept at the booking and promotion side — leading to the launch of Crom in 2017.

“The reason why I started Descendants of Crom,” Kennedy says, “was because there were no Pittsburgh festivals other than Skull Fest going on at the time. And there was nothing for this type of music. I was in this specific type of band, so I wanted to create opportunities and build the audience.”

The name is a nod to Pittsburgh’s industrial roots and an iconic gladiator, she explains.

“I wanted to tie something Pittsburgh-themed without being super obvious or trite, like Steel City this or Iron City that, so I was just like, ‘Ok, what ties in with Pittsburgh and the heavy music and metal, right?’”

“It just took me instantly back to one of my favorite childhood-series movies which were the Conan movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Crom is the goddess of steel and that was the god that he worshiped. He was a sword fighter and everything, a warrior. So the idea is we are descendants of the God of steel. We're metalheads, you know? We're a part of this.”

Whereas Skull Fest is geared more toward hardcore punk and Metal Immortal is old school, Crom traffics in various dark metals.

“It's all underground heavy stuff, but everybody is welcome,” Kennedy says. “If I like the music and you're good people, I'll probably book you. I don't care what the genre is as long as it's heavy, it's underground, it's creative and it's original. I think most people that listen to metal don't know all of the different genres because they don't go around and really experience them. So, DoC is a way of bringing community together.

“If you see me at a black metal concert or a stoner-rock concert or a thrash metal concert, whatever: To me, they're all related. Some of them are more my speed. But on the same bill, to have like 10 doom bands, or 10 stoner rock bands, or 10 thrash bands or 10 trad bands, it's like: ‘Who wants to listen to that much of the same thing the whole way through?’”

Mean 15

In all, this year’s edition of Descendants of Crom features 15 bands over two nights. It will be headlined Friday by Stinking Liz, playing Crom for the first time since 2017, and Brooklyn/Pittsburgh doomgaze band Spotlights.

“Both of the headliners that I have, they're super awesome, heavy- in their own-right bands, but they're not my typical bands,” Kennedy says. “Every once in a while, I will throw in something that I think is just really good that fits. So, Stinking Liz, they're very eccentric, very mathematical and experimental.”

Kennedy was introduced to Evansville, Ind. band Faerie Ring, a stoner metal group from the Sabbath tree, when Horehound shared a bill with them last year at the Ohio Doomed & Stoned Fest in Youngstown, Ohio. They come as a package with fellow stoner band and current touring partners Blessed Black, from Cincinnati.

For something a little faster, hop on board with Star Viper, a Pittsburgh band of “Black & Roll Synthwave Sleaze.”

“I described it to someone as ‘I feel like I'm in an old Trans Am with my hair flowing and we all have neon on, or something,’” Kennedy says. “They’re a throwback type of band, very fun. Almost too fun for me. They sometimes have, like, pool noodles and beach balls at their shows. They’re a real physical band, and they get people involved.”

Speaking of physical, it’s guaranteed with the “Rust Belt Blackened and Doomed Death Metal” of Uzkost, which translates to “anxiety” or “urgent fear” in Czech.

“Josh [Thieler], the vocalist, he’s always on the floor, no matter if there's space on the stage or not. He gets down on the floor and gets the people around him,” Kennedy says. “He's bending over backwards while he's screaming. It's very cool and brings you into the music. The whole band is really fun to watch.”

She is especially excited about the return of Passover, a self-described “noisy metallic hardcore” band from the ‘90s that recently reformed.

“Earlier this year they played a show at the Shred Shed and I caught them and it was fantastic,” Kennedy says. “…They're heavy and they're underground. They're a little bit more punk, a little bit more hardcore, like a tough metal — a breakdown metal. Every year I try to get a legacy Pittsburgh band, and that would be Passover.”

After five editions at the soon-to-close Cattivo, interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Crom moves to the goth-soaked neighborhood of Allentown to the Shred Shed, a project created by power couple “Metal” Mary Bielech and Matt Tuite with Onion Maiden co-owners Diana "Dingo" Ngo and Brooks Criswell.

“It’s in the basement of a large building,” Kennedy says. “You can't even access it from the main room on Warrington. It’s a few large rooms that almost remind you of a church basement or something, but they painted it up and everything. It's very DIY. They do things right.”

The festival is at the Shred Shed, 732 E Warrington Ave., Allentown at 7 p.m. Friday and 2:30 p.m. Saturday. All ages. Tickets are $20 Friday, $30 Saturday, $40 weekend pass; tinyurl.com/descendantsofcrom.

Friday lineup

Sundras

Blessed Black

Faerie Ring

Stinking Lizaveta

Saturday lineup

Mires

Slow Wake

Star Viper

The Long Hunt

Pillärs

FUNERALS

Axioma

Úzkost

Passover

Rebreather

Spotlights