Written by Puño Estupendo
When Brendon Small put a live band together last fall to hit college campuses and play the music of his Adult Swim show Metalocalypse, tickets were only available to the students of those same campuses and a few Myspace fans. You can well imagine how frustrated this left fans who were dying to see this version of Dethklok live but were harshly denied access to what promised to be brutal goodness. I got to see their Carbondale, Illinois show on this tour and thought it was amazing but still kind of rough in some areas. This smaller campus tour obviously proved that a bigger, traditional venue tour was warranted and so guitarist/singer/creator Small grabbed his live guys once again and got to it.
Standing outside the House Of Blues Chicago, several things were just a little off kilter for me. For one thing, it seemed way too early to be going to a club. The ticket listed a 5:30 pm door opening and there were teenagers all over the place, but not enough to visually support a sold-out show. This was a good thing to me, as I generally hate all-ages shows and was hoping for more of the "Adult" fans of Adult Swim than Billy and Bobby traveling down from Wisconsin for their first concert ever. Don't misunderstand, I realize everybody has to have their first show, but I'm an aged show veteran and there's only so many "Oh my God" and "Fucking fuck fuck fuck shit fuck" statements you can overhear before you want to strangle all of them. The benefit that a show gets from this however, is that a palpable "want" starts creeping around. Energy starts building and people just look over at each other with a grin and a nod, that eye contact that says "It's coming." It's for this very reason that I felt a little sorry for openers Soilent Green and Chimaira, both of whom were great. Both bands sounded good, were extremely tight (which is a must for this type of music) and worked well with the crowd, but for all of that there was no question what the crowd really wanted, what Billy and Bobby had traveled down from Wisconsin for, what had people huddled together with their "Oh my God's" and "I can't wait's." The crowd had since grown to capacity since my earlier observation and Chicago's hardcore had shown up in full, which seemed to make some of the young'uns a little nervous but it added to the excitement at the same time.
Article comments
1 - Tom Johnson
Glad to hear it came off well - Brendon Small chose Keneally and Beller due to their musical pedigrees. Keneally was one of Frank Zappa's last back-up guitarists and if you know anything about Zappa, he was anything if particular about who played with him. A good number in the audience were probably there for the Keneally/Beller duo as Brian is his bassist of choice, and Mike has a fanatical following, to say the least (yes, I'm one of them.) The funny thing is that neither of these guys plays anything like death metal in their typical material - there's a video on YouTube of Brian showing his technique for approaching the fast basslines and it's something he had to invent for himself because he doesn't play this style. Anyway, I'm not spamming, but you may want to stop by keneally.com and give his stuff a listen - he's pretty damned awesome on his own.