Photo by meThe scene Friday at the downtown YMCA?The metal band that was playing around 8:30Downtown YMCAFriday, Nov. 11After checking the wait time at a bus stop on Third Friday night, I decided that I had time to wander around the neighborhood a bit, and hiked up to Fourth to investigate the ping of distorted guitar and crashing cymbals that had wafted to my unsuspecting ear.Enter: the downtown YMCA. I wandered in, not fully knowing what to expect, and, after trading 7 clams for a hand stamp, entered a room full of subdued hard-rock appreciators, standing arm’s-reach from each other, watching a metal quartet bounce around in front of them. The stage was the floor beneath a trio of metal-hatched cathedral windows where light from the street backlit the band. It all looked pretty cool really; the perfect atmosphere for a metal show.The band was a relatively young group of guys (whom I was told by an audience-member were called Altered State, or Altered Reality or something close to that [it was loud]) playing abrasive hardcore, and making pretty neat work of it, but I couldn’t help noticing that the vocalist was facing the back of the room (and his drummer) as he delivered his throaty screams. He paced left to right energetically, but rarely acknowledged the crowd, other than saying something like “it’s cool to get to play with some cool bands” between songs. The backwards-facing bit could have simply been a coincidence, reserved for the last three or four songs of their set (the only ones I caught), but it seemed like more of default thing he did. The bassist to his left (and stage left) along with the guitarist to the right, didn’t break much from their front-facing rock stances much, except for the semi-synchronized scissor-kicks they punctuated their breakdowns with. Even slightly off-time, they might not have stood out so much had they not dropped out the sound to emphasize the coming riff-drop. It was a quiet room with a couple of dudes doing off-tempo scissor kicks for a second before the distortion came crashing back in.I honestly enjoyed the experience, and wished I had caught more of the band’s set. They were delightfully loud and had definitely rehearsed the songs. If they could just get those kicks down…and maybe face the crowd every now and then, they could be in it to win it.