Mauricio Masáre’s English tutors were James Hetfield, Chris Cornell and Jerry Cantrell. As a kid in the coffee-growing town of Pereira, Colombia, the budding artist saw music — specifically American metal and grunge — as a window to the globe. Today, the Metallica, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains singers that inspired him as a teen are also frequent subjects of his paintings, which layer lines — often in three-dimensional fashion — to form an image.
Visual art first brought Masáre to Charleston. He met Scott Parsons, owner of Revealed Gallery on Church Street, at an airport bar, leading to a show and then a move to the U.S. But his band, Erode the Dream, could be his next ticket to fly. On the group’s five-song debut, Neon Nightmares, which drops Jan. 11, Masáre delivers vocals that transition from a purr to a growl to a guttural bellow with power and ease, framing a dual guitar onslaught that sounds like a lost recording from early ’90s Seattle.
The group formed from jam sessions between bassist Robbie Weise, drummer Steven Wilson and guitarists Ryan Martin and Jon Stout (the latter another multidimensional artist known for his photography as BadJon)…