Toxic Holocaust was the opener tonight and for the first time I feel like I sort of "get" Thrash. I mean, like everyone else I listen to old Metallica, Megadeth, but I've never really been a Thrash guy overall, never appealed to me. But live, you really see what Thrash is about. It's just fast, aggressive, and high energy music. These guys didn't get the same energy going as last night, but they were certainly no slouches with large circle pits throughout the performance and generally getting the crowd hyped up. After their performace I was hanging out near the merch booth and I don't think there was a moment where the band was not talking to someone and being complimented on their performance.
Kingdom of Sorrow was next up. In some ways, they seemed to struggle by comparison to Toxic Holocaust. They are heavy in a completely different way and not really as aggressive as their predecessor, and while they kept the audience engaged (and in fact the vocalist was great about maintaining audience attention), it was rather interesting that they had to put in a lot of effort to do what the first band had done effortlessly. The music was also better than I remembered...not my style, but not the mess I had thought it would be...sounded really good.
Gwar was the headliner and, if you've never heard of Gwar's live shows, I suggest a youtube search. In a fast summation, we had: Mccain gutted, Obama decapitated, Clinton de-titted, human sacrifices, and epic robot battles. A lot of people went into the front with nice white shirts. Those people left with soaking brown shirts (brown due to the combination of red and green blood). The performace tonight was a bit unique though, in that about 45 minutes in, the band's sound was abruptly stopped, mid-song. After the band tried to play it off, it soon became apparent something had actually gone wrong. We were later informed by the staff over megaphone that the smoke had set off the fire alarm and while the building needed no evacuation, the show was delayed about 30 minutes. Ignoring that little incident though, a good performance, though it should be noted that the music being played is heavy metal...the music is really not that good, so don't go for that...go for the show.
No comments:
Post a Comment