Rock And Roll Hotel | DCHeavyMetal.com

A Post About The Dead Kennedys?

Yep, I’m making a post about the Dead Kennedys on my heavy metal blog. I went to see them on Saturday the 16th of October 2010 at the Rock And Roll Hotel in Washington DC, and no I’m not going to do a full review of the show here. Instead I wanted to post somewhere that I think I’ve got the first footage, posted online at least, of the Dead Kennedys playing their two new songs, Area 51 and You’re Such A Fake. Wouldn’t be such a big deal but they haven’t written a new song since they reformed in 2001 without their notorious vocalist Jello Biafra. Well, not that I know of.

I’m not a huge punk rock fan, if you haven’t been able to guess yet I’m a big metal head. Growing up in this area it’s pretty hard not to be exposed to some of the punk scene though. When I was in high school a lot of my friends were into those classic punk bands like the Ramones, the Misfits, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys as well as local acts like Minor Threat and the Suspects. Back in the day I’d be getting them to listen to Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel while they were playing me Fugazi and the like. My point in all this is, I’m not some die hard fan of punk, I don’t care that it’s not the same to see the Dead Kennedys without Jello Biafra singing or it’s some un-punk cash grab or whatever. To lose all my punk credibility I still go to see the Misfits sometimes too. I enjoy these bands mostly for the nostalgia of it all, if you have a problem with that take it somewhere else, I really don’t care. These shows are fun to me and I’m tired of people in the underground scene coming up with reasons not to see bands all the damn time. Plus I saw the Dead Kennedys play Jaxx back in May 2002 with Brandon Cruz on vocals and I really had a great time. Klaus Flouride was still in the band then too. Anyways, seeing East Bay Ray and D.H. Peligro play all those songs with a bunch of my old high school friends was pretty damn fun.

Now, that all said, since I do run a metal blog and often shoot video at concerts to post, I generally do that at any show I see these days, regardless of genre. I was planning on posting the videos to YouTube but I wasn’t planning on making a blog post about it. I happened to get a shot of the setlist after the show ended, but that wasn’t strange. What I didn’t notice until I was uploading the files and trying to sort out the song names was that I didn’t recognize two of them. Now I know the Dead Kennedys haven’t put out any new material since they reformed without Jello Biafra in 2001, mainly because everyone talks about how he doesn’t like that the band reformed without him but still uses the name to play all the old songs. And since I’m not extremely well versed in punk rock, maybe these songs are covers of other bands, but I don’t think they are. I think they are two new songs from the Dead Kennedys with their new singer Ron “Skip” Greer on vocals. Even Google and YouTube searches haven’t turned up anything by them with these song titles, so I think I’m the first to post these songs online. Correct me if I’m wrong here though.

This first video is actually three songs recorded in a row. The first is Kill The Poor and there’s nothing particularly interesting about this version of it. The second song, starting at about 2:50 is MP3 Get Off The Web which is really just MTV Get Off The Air with lyrics changed to be about people downloading mp3s and how much they suck for doing it. And although I don’t believe that telling your fans at a concert that they are the problem with the music industry is a smart idea, the part that I really don’t like is that the new guy is changing Jello’s lyrics. This was the only song they did this on, I think, but if you wanna do that then just fucking write a new song, don’t butcher the classics if you’re not the guy who wrote it. It would piss me off to no end if Dio had changed lyrics to Ozzy era Black Sabbath songs live and this was much the same to me. Anyways, the third song in the video below is Area 51 and it starts at about 7:38. Check it out, ~~new DK tune~~. UPDATE: As mentioned in the comments below, the song Area 51 is actually a song by East Bay Ray’s other band the Killer Smiles. However the other song, You’re Such A Fake, is not by the Killer Smiles and so I think it is a completely new composition by the Dead Kennedys. Not only their first new song without Jello, but their first in 24 years.

The next video here is of the final two songs the band played (it was their second encore of the night). The first is the other new tune You’re Such A Fake. After that, at about 2:45, is the classic song Chemical Warfare which isn’t too odd other than they play a bit of the Lynyrd Skynyrd song Sweet Home Alabama in there at about 5:55. I really wasn’t expecting that.

Well, those are the new songs, love them or hate them it looks like the Dead Kennedys might be getting ready to put out some new material, the first since what, Bedtime For Democracy in 1986? And yes, you heard it first on a heavy metal blog. With that, I’ll leave you all with the rest of the videos I shot at the concert below, classics like Holiday In Cambodia and Too Drunk To Fuck. Enjoy!

October 18, 2010
Categories: Concert Reviews, Rock And Roll Hotel, Uncategorized . Tags: Area 51, Band, Concert, Dead Kennedys, Gig, Music, Punk, Punk Rock, You're Such A Fake . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: 9 Comments

Review of Cynic gig at Rock And Roll Hotel

Wow, this was one of the best concerts I’ve been to in a while. Sunday the 8th of August 2010 was a hot day, and while I know lots of people were down at Jiffy Lube Live for the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival, I decided to stay cool and head over to the Rock And Roll Hotel for a killer line up of progressive metal. I’m really glad I did, this concert was just great. Cynic was the headliner, but I wanted to check out the opening acts, Intronaut and Dysrhythmia also so I got there a bit early.

I got there a couple minutes after 7:30 and the opening band, Dysrhythmia was already playing their first song. They were great when I saw them play at the Velvet Lounge in February 2009 so I knew I wanted to get to the Rock & Roll Hotel in time to catch their set. If you’ve never heard them before, they’re an instrumental three piece from New York City that just shreds live. The bass player, Colin Marston is a member of the band Krallice and he also plays in the current version of Gorguts with Dysrhythmia’s guitarist, Kevin Hufnagel. Dysrhythmia’s songs twist and turn all over the place and rarely do they come back to playing the same riff again, instead their songs are constantly moving forward and evolving. That combined with the fast tempos that makes the music just really fun to listen to live. There are no words and really none are necessary as the music is totally engaging on it’s own. Really my biggest complaint with their set was the short length, but they were the first of three bands so it wasn’t really that surprising. They were a great way to start off this concert though.

Next up was Intronaut. They’re a band from LA that I’m not as familiar with as the other two bands. I’ve heard their 2008 album Prehistorisms and while I do enjoy it, I wouldn’t call it life changing progressive metal. They have a new album coming out soon and they played a couple songs from that live. They aren’t bad live and their rhythm section really kept the songs moving with groovy beats you don’t always get so much of in this metal sub genre. I was certainly impressed by their drummer, Danny Walker, in the live setting too, he really killed it back there. While their music is pretty interesting, they were pretty laid back on stage. Towards the end of their set the lead singer/guitarist, Sacha Dunable, asked the audience if anyone had any weed or whiskey before the Cynic set started. At the end of the song someone had brought shots to the stage for them, haha. Their final song of the night, Any Port, saw the other guitarist, Dave Timnick, put down his guitar at the beginning of the song to pick up a couple of mallets and pound on some upright (conga?) drums. He slung his guitar back on and continued to play the bulk of the song until he joined in at the end for the song’s drum solo. The rest of the band walked off the stage while he and Danny put on a rhythmic drum show that sort of reminded me of that old Sepultura song Kiowas, tho not so tribal sounding. It was a cool way to close out a good set, and I’m definitely going to check out their new album when it comes out. They certainly had left the audience warmed up and ready for the main act who was due up next, Cynic.

When I came from the downstairs bar to watch Cynic the stage looked different. They had their backdrop lit up and they put up a couple of circle shaped screens. They started projecting trippy videos onto these and they turned on some funky lights. One could have mistaken it for a Pink Floyd cover band setting up, but this was much better than that. I’d never seen Cynic before, but everyone has told me they’re good live. They weren’t kidding, what followed was a fantastic set. Definitely one the best concerts I’ve seen in a long time, maybe the best show I’ve seen this year in fact. Cynic formed in Florida in the late 80s during the time the state’s legendary death metal scene was forming. Due to delays caused by two of the members touring with Death and then hurricane Andrew destroying their practice space as well as most of the state, the band only ever released one full length album, the classic Focus, before breaking up in 1994. One of the draws of this tour is that Cynic would be playing that album in its entirety. Since reforming they’ve put out another full length album and an EP, both of which I also highly recommend. For a band that started over 20 years ago they have a very small catalog of songs, which in their case I think worked as an advantage here. Since they have so many really good songs on those releases, the audience was treated to hearing most of Cynic’s songs live, instead of the standard “pick a song or two from each album” approach most older bands must do for their live shows. They started the show off with Veil Of Maya and continued through the excellent Focus album in almost top form. Guitarist Tymon Kruidenier apologized that he had lost his voice earlier that day so was having trouble keeping up with some of the growling. Luckily it’s heavy metal and the vocals are generally not the most important aspect of the music, certainly not in Cynic’s case. On top of that all the clean vocals (sung through a vocoder) were done by Paul Masvidal. Otherwise, the band was spot on. They obviously had played these songs enough to have completely mastered them for the live setting, guitars, bass and drums. Added with the cool light effects, this show was just mesmerizing. After playing Focus straight through, the rest of the band left the stage as Paul pulled out a nylon string acoustic guitar and played the song Integral off their latest EP, Re-Traced. This was a nice little interlude for the fans and a good divider for the rest of the show. When the band returned they played a nice mix of their newer material, and they even threw into the setlist the song Cosmos, which was un-released until it became a bonus track on the 2004 reissue of Focus. You couldn’t have asked for a better setlist for this show, and if you had a favorite song you were hoping they would play, they probably did. At one point Paul had everyone in the audience do a yoga stretch. A bit new age but I’ve got to admit that’s something I never thought I’d see at a metal show, everyone doing yoga. Overall Cynic put on a dazzling display of technical progressive heavy metal and showed that not only are they one of the genre’s older influential bands, but they’re also one of the current leading bands of the genre, even if they took off a dozen years.

I really had a great time at this show. I talked with a fan of this blog, Josh, for a bit between sets which is always cool. It always surprises me when people come up to me and recognize me from the site, I’m glad some of you seem to be enjoying it. I also pulled a promo poster off the wall that I got all of the guys in Cynic to sign for me after the show. I’m not usually a big fan of autographs but I wanted something to remember the show by that was a bit more distinct than a t-shirt (I did buy the sticker pack too). This show was just what I needed, after a few let downs (the cancellation of the Enthroned concert last week as well as the mediocre Iron Maiden show last month) this show really hit the spot. All three bands were excellent and I’m glad I got to be there. Now on to the videos. They’re a bit dark but the sound is decent in them. The first is Dysrhythmia, the next two are Intronaut and the rest are Cynic, enjoy.

August 10, 2010
Categories: Concert Reviews, Progressive Metal, Rock And Roll Hotel . Tags: Band, Concert, Concert Review, Cynic, Dysrhythmia, Gig, Heavy Metal, Intronaut, Metal, Music, Progressive Metal, Review, Rock And Roll Hotel, Tour, Washington DC . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: 1 Comment

Review of Municipal Waste gig at Rock And Roll Hotel

So Sunday the 25th of April I decided that instead of going to the Earth Day Climate Rally on the national mall, I’d much rather go to see the bands Municipal Waste and Toxic Holocaust at the Rock & Roll Hotel. No I’m not some hipster just trying to be ironic, I really couldn’t give a shit about Sting, I want some thrash! When I got to the venue the opener, Black Anvil had just finished playing, so I didn’t get a chance to see them. After talking to a few of my friends who had already gotten there I moved up to the front of the stage. There wasn’t much of a crowd in there when I got inside, but the place was filling up by the time Toxic Holocaust finished their set. They played a really good set and they’re one of those bands who not only plays their material faster live, but with much more energy. They didn’t talk much between songs and really just came out to shred it seemed, and the audience seemed to get into it a bit. It was a great set to warm the crowd up, though I’m not sure if they really needed it.

After a rather long set up time, Richmond natives Municipal Waste hit the stage. The crowd was ready and it didn’t take long for people to start running onto the stage and stage diving back into the audience. The security was not happy about this and had its hands full trying to kick people out. Several times between songs Municipal Waste berated the security for kicking people out and I noticed the bouncers had started to just throw people back into the pit when they were crowd surfing. That was a pretty intense mosh pit, I did my best to stay out (moshing with my cameras = not good!) but you could tell it was made up of a lot of DC hardcore kids and they were ready to get brutal. People were singing along with catchy chorus lines and just all out having fun. Their set was a good mix of songs from all their albums, though I don’t think the audience cared what they played really, as long as it was fast. That’s because their vocalist, Tony Foresta, had such great stage presence. He was jumping around and instructing the circle pit which way to spin and turning the mic around so the people could help out. He told people to all jump up on stage for the final song so it wouldn’t matter if people got kicked out by security, and they did! It looked like maybe a dozen people were crammed on the stage by the time the song ended. The only gripe I really had about the show was that they did the typical “walk off stage and wait for the crowd to chant for an encore” rock star bullshit thing. I thought that was kinda glam, especially considering they’ve got such a punk influence. That’s really not a big deal, and the show was a lot of fun for everyone except security!

Below I’ve posted the videos I shot with my normal camera from this concert. If you saw me there you may have noticed I also had a palm cam that I was shooting with. It’s actually a friend of mine’s and he was letting me borrow it. The video quality came out great though the audio was terrible, complete overload once the guitars started up so I didn’t post them to YouTube with these other vids. There is a recording volume control but I didn’t know how to use it until I looked it up after the concert. That’s ok though because really this was just a test run for when I bring it to Maryland Deathfest next month. It really did a good job of adjusting to the dark setting though, which if you look at the third video below, you can see my normal camera does not. The audio is still good on those though, so I hope you enjoy them.

April 26, 2010
Categories: Concert Reviews, Rock And Roll Hotel, Thrash Metal . Tags: Concert, Concert Review, Gig, Heavy Metal, Municipal Waste, Review, Rock And Roll Hotel, Thrash Metal, Toxic Holocaust, Washington DC . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: 4 Comments

High On Fire and Doomriders Reviews

Well, this evening was a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure style night. It was a Sunday night, the 11th of April 2010, and I had a small problem, 2 bands I wanted to see were playing the same night at different venues. High On Fire at the Black Cat and the Doomriders at the Rock & Roll Hotel. I called up a couple friends of mine to see if they wanted to try to squeeze in both shows. They were up for the double feature and we headed off to the Rock And Roll Hotel to catch the Doomriders first. The show was running late and when we got there the first band, Fang Island, was still setting up. I only watched them for a single song before heading upstairs. They weren’t too interesting to me, and not very metal anyways. For some reason they had 3 guitarists on stage, and their bass player switched off to play they keyboard. After a couple beers we went back down while the Doomriders were setting up. The crowd wasn’t too close together and we basically just walked right up to the front. One of the friends I was with had another friend at the Black Cat who was updating us on the status of the bands playing there. We decided that when Priestess was playing their last song we’d have to leave, regardless of if the Doomriders were done or not. Anyways, the Doomriders finally did come out and they were really energetic. I’m sure they won over some new fans who were really just there to see the headliner Red Sparowes, people were getting into them. I also saw a little kid (pic) up there in the front row, he was even throwing horns and headbanging to the music. Their show kicked ass so you can’t blame him! One thing though, their bass player, a really tall guy named Jebb Riley, was actually too tall for the stage! His head was hidden from most of the crowd during the show because the overhead speakers were blocking him. I’ve never seen that kind of problem before, haha. The mix was pretty good I’ve got to say, though the lighting was pretty crappy (the R&R Hotel doesn’t have good lights so that’s to be expected). They were playing their last song of the night, which was apparently also their slowest and longest, when we got the message that we needed to head over to the Black Cat. We didn’t wait for the long song to end and promptly headed straight for the door.

We piled into my car and headed over to the Black Cat. I found a good parking spot on the street right next to the venue, and we went right into the club. We could hear High On Fire had already started playing Frost Hammer, though the ticket guy said the band had just started. We rushed up the stairs and headed into the crowd. We got up there pretty close fairly easily, I guess people were scared of the mosh pit? As usual the lighting wasn’t great, but I still got some good pics I think. The sound mix was terrible though, I mean really bad. I’ve posted videos below and they’re actually a pretty good representative of the sound. It’s not my camera that makes it sound muffled, it’s the mix. I even heard a few random shouts from the crowd between songs demanding the guitars to be turned up. The vocals were really low in the mix too, at least from where I was standing. Matt Pike (of Sleep fame) really had a hold of the crowd though, people were going crazy and his stage presence was a big part of that, even if you could see his beer gut and ass crack (depending on which way he was facing) the whole time. Regardless, the show was really fun and they played a lot of the songs from their new album, Snakes For The Divine, which is cool because that album is pretty awesome. I was trying to shoot a video of the title track but some guy with a flash light told me I wasn’t allowed to take video. I don’t think that is the Black Cat’s usual policy, so maybe the band requested that. Strange. I still shot the 3 vids below before he told me to stop, though I thought Snakes For The Divine was the best song they played all night. Still, the show was a blast, the crowd was going crazy and the metal was loud!

In all the entire night was a lot of fun, I haven’t done the concert hopping thing in a while and it was a great night for metal in DC (even though I missed the first ever metal show at DC Star, but there was no way I could fit that in too). I haven’t been to a whole hell of a lot of concerts so far this year, but I should be seeing several awesome gigs here up through Maryland Deathfest, for which I’ve already got a 3 day pass. This is going to be a good spring for metal heads in the DC area.

April 12, 2010
Categories: Black Cat, Concert Reviews, Doom Metal, Rock And Roll Hotel, Sludge Metal . Tags: Concert, Concert Review, Doomriders, Gig, Heavy Metal, High On Fire, Music . Author: Metal Chris . Comments: 5 Comments

Review of Baroness gig at Rock And Roll Hotel

On Wednesday the 18th of November 2009 I got off my ass and headed up to the Rock And Roll Hotel in the Atlas Theatre district of North East Washington, DC to go see Baroness play. I’d been to the Rock & Roll Hotel before, but not to see a band play. The venue wasn’t great, not very wide but deep, which must have been a bitch for the people in the back trying to see. The stage lighting was pretty poor and they don’t allow flash photography and since I can’t afford a $3k camera my pics aren’t the greatest. They did allow you to shoot video, but again since the lighting was so bad it all came out pretty dark (though the audio isn’t too bad) which you can see for yourself at the bottom of this post. It was $4.50 for a Miller Lite bottle which I guess is pretty standard for DC. The bar was crammed on one of the side walls to the back of the room, and the merch stand was crammed into the other side in front of the mixing console. Apparently they don’t allow moshing of any kind because a couple songs in when some guy started pushing people a bit the security came right up and put an end to that. The shift actually helped me get a little closer to the stage. Even though I’m usually holding a camera up front, I really don’t mind moshing at concerts (hate crowd surfers tho). If you don’t want people moshing at your venue, maybe you shouldn’t book metal bands at let them play somewhere more fun instead. Anyways, on to the band’s performance…

This was the first show of the tour supporting Baroness’ new album, Blue Record. I’m not certain but I’m betting this was the first time those songs were being played live. On the stage they had a cool looking fabric backdrop of the cover art from the new album. Their show started off a bit disorganized, they had some intro song playing, then it stopped, then after several minutes of silence they walked onto the stage and started playing. I noticed the lead guitarist had changed from a St. Vitus shirt to a Dark Castle shirt in this time, for some reason. I really like the energy of a lot of their songs on their new album. I’ve listened to their first one, Red Album, a few times but it has never gripped me as much as these newer songs do. The one thing I don’t like about the new album is all the intros and instrumentals, there’s a lot of them. Unfortunately for me, they play them live too. I guess that’s cool for people who enjoy them, but it’s really just a pause in the energy to me and honestly I don’t find theirs particularly interesting. Their show was pretty loud for a club this size, which is never a bad thing to me. The kick drum was really pounding, though the microphones didn’t seem to work well for the live show. They seemed to be very tight uni-directional microphones, which means if you’re not directly in front of them, you might as well be in the next room. This made the vocals just disappear completely from the mix a few times when the band members were particularly excited on stage. This was especially a problem for the lead guitarist and bass player, who were helping with backing vocals from time to time, since their mics were not as loud in the mix to begin with. The show was pretty good for the most part, they played most of the songs I really wanted to hear. The stage was pretty cramped but they still did a few theatrics to make things interesting. I thought it was kinda cool when the drummer poured water on his cymbals before a big entrance in a song, spraying the water everywhere in a cool visual effect. At the end of the show they did the typical encore thing where they walked off stage and waited a couple minutes to come back and play their final song of the night. I don’t understand why every headliner band seems to feel the need to do this, regardless of genre. It’s not an encore if it’s scripted! Anyways, they did play for almost an hour and a half, which might be a bit long for them. I mean I do enjoy their music, but since they’ve only got 2 full length albums out, they started running out of material to play that’s of the same caliber. This made the show start to drag on a bit for me. I really think these guys are a great up and coming band and I think with some better exposure they would be playing much larger venues. On the other hand, watching concerts at the 9:30 Club has become quite a drag, so I hope they don’t get too big too quick! It was a really fun show and for $12 it was well worth attending.

One more thing, if you’re planning on buying the Blue Record on vinyl at the concert, try to do it early. They ran out of copies to sell at this show. They said they were getting more the next day, but who knows how long those will last. I spoke to the bass player, Summer Welch, after the show, and the band seemed to think the vinyl was available on their record label’s website, Relapse.com. I had checked earlier that day and knew it wasn’t, so that means this vinyl is going to sell more than they’re expecting since people can’t buy it anywhere. They were selling all vinyl for $20, all t-shirts for $15 and CDs for $12, cash only of course.