If you love metal at all, you owe it to yourself to go see GWAR at least once in your lifetime. Five guys, dressed in costumes that make them look part space alien, part monster and part full-on awesome, running a stage show where they meet (and kill) a variety of humans and aliens, spraying the audience with a variety of fluids in the process, all while playing a nice blend of thrash and punk and singing songs about sex, violence and really not liking people. It’s the ultimate spectacle, what heavy metal shows are really supposed to be all about.
As it so happens, GWAR happens to be on tour right now and they just came through my hometown of New York City. Opening for GWAR on this tour are two younger bands quickly climbing in popularity: Municipal Waste, from Richmond, Virginia and The Red Chord from Revere, Massachusetts. Together, the three bands made for one of the most entertaining tour packages I’ve seen in 2006.
Municipal Waste Doesn’t Waste Time
Municipal Waste led off the night (full disclosure: I was on Municipal Waste's guest list for the evening). Devotees of crossover thrash, Municipal Waste plays songs that are lyrically part drunken binge, part amusement park house of horrors, over a musical assault that borrows more from its punk rock than metal roots. Although this band isn’t one you’d go see to marvel at their technical abilities, that doesn’t mean they don’t put on a good show. Thanks in part to their high-energy performance and in part to the large number of their fan base in the crowd that evening, sprinkled with extra bits like the beer bong girl (who gave people in the front of the stage hits of beer through a funnel), Municipal Waste put on a show that made for a great opener.See pictures of Municipal Waste from this show.
The Red Chord Builds Off of Crowd Dislike
For some reason, there were more than a few hecklers active during The Red Chord’s set. Maybe it was because they were a Boston band playing to a New York crowd. Maybe there were enough people in the audience who didn’t like The Red Chord’s mix of death metal and hardcore, or maybe, just maybe, a few people took offense to the occasional bits of jazz fusion (making me think I had wandered into a Mr. Bungle concert without knowing it) that popped up in their music. Maybe they were drunk and wanted to get to GWAR faster.In any case, the heckling actually made the show better, as The Red Chord responded by taking their stage show to the next level. Singer Guy Kozowyk traded insults with the crowd before calling for (and getting) people to line up for a Wall of Death; guitarist Jonny Fay climbed up to the top of his speaker stack and did a Van-Halen-style leap onto the stage; Guy, bassist Greg Weeks and guitarist Mike McKenzie finished the show in the security well between the stage and the crowd, literally playing to the audience. I hope someone out there made a recording of the show for posterity, because The Red Chord’s set was a textbook example of how to get a great show out of a hostile crowd.
See pictures of The Red Chord from this show.
GWAR is All We Know
GWAR concerts generally have two things in common:- A stage show where various characters in costumes as outrageous as GWAR’s come out, interact with GWAR and frequently end up dead in the process. Those albums with a storyline, like Beyond Hell, the album for this tour, have the general story written up in the lyrics.
- During the show, all of those characters end up spraying some sort of body fluid (in the form of water mixed with food coloring) all over the front of the audience.
