By the time church bells began ringing through Bigs Bar Live Thursday night, the stage had already eaten a kick, a guitar string and a good portion of Devils on Deck’s clean bass signal. The crowd had spent stretches of the evening standing nearly motionless. One guitarist had fought his instrument. Another band had watched the sound system fight theirs. Then Caster Volor walked out, turned their backs to the room and let the drummer speak first.
A nasty opening lick cracked through the hesitation.
Now we had a rock show.
The August 13 bill paired Minneapolis shock-rock road dogs Caster Volor with two South Dakota bands operating at opposite ends of the night’s personality: the heavier Rivorium and the lighter, harmony-minded Devils on Deck. The lineup was confirmed by Bigs, and Caster Volor’s Sioux Falls stop sat directly between Hayward, Wisconsin and a two-night South Dakota-to-Iowa run through Rapid City and Cedar Rapids.
That routing would make sense later. Caster Volor performs like a band that has learned there is no guarantee the next town gives a damn who you are. So you make them.
Rivorium understood another version of that lesson.
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Heavy without the blur
There is heavy music that simply keeps adding weight until every song starts resembling the previous one. Rivorium avoided that problem almost immediately.
Mariah Skye handled bass and lead vocals while Matt Rorge worked guitar and contributed screamed vocals, leaving drummer Dave Gacke behind the kit. Sioux Falls listings have described Rivorium as metal or metal/hardcore, but the labels only get you partway there.
Skye could push into the harsher parts of the material without sacrificing the clean vocal passages surrounding them. Rorge’s screams gave her another texture to work against rather than simply doubling the aggression. There were moments when the high, cutting metal phrasing brought Judas Priest to mind, only with a woman at the center of it. Not imitation. More the same taste for a vocal line capable of cutting straight through distorted guitar.
Behind them, Gacke was impossible to ignore.
Shirtless, sweating, bandanna around his head, long hair and beard moving as much as his arms, he looked exactly like a man who had been sitting behind a drum kit for most of his life. Later, Gacke told me he began playing at 12. He is 43 now and a Sioux Falls native. Thirty-one years with sticks in your hands tends to show.
Then he put the sticks down.
For the opening of “Frozen Fire,” Gacke went directly to the drums with his hands. The change in attack was immediate. Skin against drumhead gave the opening a more physical sound before the sticks returned and the song expanded around it. It was not a stunt inserted because somebody thought the set needed one. It changed the character of the song.
That kind of decision kept Rivorium from becoming a forty-minute blunt object.
Their material has been written across a long stretch of time, and the band said the members have been playing together since 2018. You could hear some of that accumulation in the set. The songs did not all seem interested in solving the same problem. Tempos shifted. Skye moved between clean singing and harsher delivery. Rorge stepped into the vocal picture when another voice was useful. Gacke could hammer away, then suddenly become the most subtle person onstage.
Together, the songs began to suggest sequence rather than inventory. One fed the next.
Rivorium has been working toward a full album, with the band hoping for an early 2027 release, possibly spring. That follows a recording break earlier this year before they returned to Sioux Falls stages.
On Thursday, they sounded ready for a record that lets the songs disagree with each other a little.
That is usually where the interesting stuff starts.
When the room fights back
Devils on Deck came out sounding almost cheerfully strange by comparison.
Their opening number had a scratchy, quirky rock feel that announced the tonal change without apology. The South Dakota band describes itself as working across classic rock, ’90s alternative and punk alongside original material, and that looseness fits. Christin’s lead vocals sat comfortably inside the lighter indie-rock side of the set, and she occasionally picked up a tambourine while the guitars filled out the edges.
Then the sound started going sideways.
Clipping began creeping into the mix. A persistent bass hum sat through roughly half of what should have been one of the band’s liveliest songs. Whatever was happening in the system, it flattened some of their attack and made the band sound smaller than the people playing.
There is a point where criticism has to know who it is criticizing. That song did not stumble because Devils on Deck suddenly forgot how to play it. The sound did them no favors.
The drummer lost a kick partway through. They kept going.
The next song was better.
That recovery also exposed what the set had been trying to show before the technical problems barged in. The bassist remained fairly stiff visually, but the lead guitarist played with his whole body, pushing into parts instead of standing over them. A later solo finally gave the guitar enough room to cut cleanly through the room, and it was one of the first moments when Bigs visibly seemed to wake up.
The real selling point, though, was the vocal harmony.
Christin did not need to overpower the band because the voices worked better stacked. When those harmonies were clear, Devils on Deck sounded much more distinctive than they did when everything depended on guitar volume. Their songs have an easygoing quality, but the vocal arrangements gave them something underneath the lightness.
Then came the song written by Christin’s husband.
Specifically, a song he wrote so his wife could sing about eating pussy.
There really is no tasteful euphemism that improves that sentence.
It fit the band’s sense of humor, and maybe the guitar gods appreciated the joke because shortly afterward his string broke in the middle of a song.
Apparently, this has happened before. During the 2025 South Dakota Battle of the Bands, where Devils on Deck were finalists, he broke a string, fixed it, came back and managed to break another one. Thursday’s failure therefore felt less like disaster and more like a recurring character in the band.
Some nights the equipment is just going to get its verse.
Devils on Deck never completely conquered a room that remained frustratingly still for much of the set, but the harmonies, humor and recovery after the technical mess showed more about the band than a perfectly behaved PA probably would have.
Then the lights shifted.
Church bells rang.
Welcome to the freak show
Voices followed the bells, choral and vaguely liturgical, singing in Latin while Caster Volor stood facing away from us.
For a band whose public identity is built around shock rock and theatrical hard rock, the entrance showed some welcome restraint. No immediate sprint to the front. No demand for applause. No speech telling us how dangerous this was all going to be.
They let anticipation do a little work first.
Then drummer Niko Aguilera opened it up.
The difference in presentation was immediate. Clean attack. Tight changes. Bodies moving with purpose. Alexsander “Caster” Volor out front, Steven “Pöllixx” Volor on guitar, Aguilera hammering from behind them. The current Caster Volor lineup also includes backing vocalist Kaitlin Rose.
If Rivorium occasionally suggested Judas Priest, Caster Volor practically invited the comparison inside and poured it a drink. Their own biography names Priest among the influences, alongside Mötley Crüe, W.A.S.P., Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie and Rammstein. More important, they understood the old heavy-metal bargain behind those bands. Big riffs are good. Big riffs attached to a visual somebody remembers tomorrow are better.
Caster began testing just how willing Sioux Falls was to play along.
“How do we feel about Russian lesbians?”
A beat.
“They’re an endangered species that need our support”
And into t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” they went.
The cover made perfect sense once it started. That melody was already built for melodrama. Caster Volor simply replaced the early-2000s electronic pulse with harder muscle and treated the chorus as something designed to be shouted back at a stage. The band openly lists t.A.T.u. among the less obvious artists it pulls into its cover repertoire.
Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” worked for the opposite reason. That one already belongs in this world. Caster Volor did not need to reinvent its sneer. They just had to push.
Soon the crowd was actually participating instead of observing.
There was a birthday to deal with too. Caster’s birthday was coming Saturday, so Sioux Falls got pulled into the celebration early. It was one more excuse for the barrier between performer and audience to get kicked around.
And then the guitarist climbed onto the vocalist’s shoulders.
Because apparently standing on the stage was no longer sufficient.
That physical showmanship is not incidental to Caster Volor. Their official material describes the band as a theatrical production as much as a musical one, with an industrial stage presentation and a deliberately oversized approach to hard rock. Bigs did not require all the hardware for the attitude to survive. The members themselves supplied enough movement.
Even their stupidest joke had commitment behind it.
At one point, the band began arguing about whether they were really going to finish playing the “piece of shit” pop song they had wandered into.
Yes, they were.
Caster Volor recorded its own version of LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” in 2020, and hearing hard-rock musicians behave as though they had accidentally discovered themselves inside “party rock is in the house tonight” is exactly as ridiculous as it should be. The trick is that the band plays the joke straight enough musically for it to work.
That distinction runs through their whole set.
Caster Volor can be sexually suggestive, deliberately offensive and proudly juvenile. They can throw middle fingers, say things designed to get somebody’s aunt angry and turn pop songs into punchlines. But the playing underneath it is disciplined. Without that, the act collapses into dudes wearing black leather saying naughty things.
“Black Leather Middle Finger” proved the point.
The song has been part of the Caster Volor catalog since the 2018 debut EP and returned on 2025’s Paracosm. On Thursday it came with a drum solo that briefly stripped away the comedy and left percussion to carry the room. Aguilera made good use of it, not merely playing louder but turning the solo into another piece of stage punctuation.
Then came Drowning Pool’s “Bodies”.
Subtle, it was not.
Nobody had asked for subtle.
By then Caster Volor had already shown why its cover choices work. The band does not treat the set like a jukebox. A pop hit, a metal staple and a t.A.T.u. song all get dragged into the same grubby theater until they belong to the same people.
The originals have to survive beside songs an audience already knows. “Black Leather Middle Finger” did. So did “Hard R,” which closed the night and opens the band’s 2025 Paracosm EP.
That was the smarter closing choice.
A cover can win a room. An original has to send it home.
Afterglow
A few hours earlier, Rivorium’s Dave Gacke had put his drumsticks down and opened “Frozen Fire” with his bare hands.
Later, a kick disappeared. A bass signal hummed where it was not invited. A guitar string snapped. Devils on Deck kept playing. The room resisted them for a while. They kept playing too.
Then Caster Volor arrived with church bells, Latin voices, middle fingers, shoulder-mounted guitarists and a catalog that somehow found room for t.A.T.u., Drowning Pool and LMFAO without making the originals feel like the bathroom break.
There was plenty Thursday night that was messy.
That is different from forgettable.
The cleanest moment might have been Caster Volor’s opening drum lick, but the night was more accurately represented by everything that had happened before it. Musicians adjusting. Hardware failing. Songs changing shape. A crowd taking longer than expected to come alive.
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