ROCKET REVIEW: GOATWHORE At Hollywood’s The Knitting Factory On Friday The 13th!

Metal Blade Records is one of the labels in heavy music who seems to understand what true metal is all about. The uniquely fascinating New Orleans act comprised primarily of the legendary guitar player from Acid Bath Sammy ‘Pierre’ Duet and the simply diabolical in leather wrist gauntlets, Ben Falgoust (also the mainman of Soilent Green) were signed to MB’s impressive and ever expanding roster in 2004. On this dreaded night of ‘so-called’ impending horrors, mainly over-hyped every damn time it pops up on the calendar since Jason Voorhees started killing people back in the early 80’s on the silver screen, this Friday The 13th certainly felt pretty creepy to me. Nothing like seeing your little brother leap ten feet out of his seat in the movie theater when you grab his knee suddenly at the very point Jason jumps at the girl in the boat at the end of the original scare-fest classic. As I made my way to the show at The Knitting Factory in Hollywood on Hollywood Blvd, the area played out like a slowly-creeking movie reel of sinister moment by moment luridness happening directly under your nose, a literal “creepshow come-to-life” in and of itself, for as I was studying the decayed, early 1900’s constructed architecture and the sidewalks limitless ‘walk of fame stars’, mainly belonging to B-level personalities that you have never heard of. I was surrounded by some of life’s oddest and most shockingly empty-souls trying to peddle crack cocaine, ten sacks of methamphetamine or their own dirty asshole off the street corner in front of the venue. And that my friends, is what I call a TRUE Friday the 13th! TMD Rocks!

When I got into the venue, the crowd was thick and so was the stench of stale man and woman beast. The small club seemed to hold about one-hundred and fifty in occupancy, give or take a dozen or two from that estimate, and I couldn’t help but notice that most of the people in the crowd looked like they were more ready to see Justin Timberlake in concert than actually being in the midst of one of the world’s most unfaltering preachers of the damned and defiled. Don’t get me wrong, every now and again I would lock eyes with the real warriors who wore the mighty pentagram marked or gratuitously evil-designed T-Shirt’s with that droned out, zombie-like scowl on their face. The worst part of the event needs to be expressed here. And so, the world record of ‘soundchecks’ that I next stood through for the following 20-25 minutes was something that I will not soon forget, and I have been going to metal shows for twenty-five years. I have no clue as to why the hell any band on planet fucking earth would need to take THIS LONG to get their levels correct with the sound dude on each instrument WHEN THE AUDIENCE WAS STANDING BEFORE THEM as some (thankfully enough) brutal black or death metal headbangers pumping from the room’s sound system kept us all at bay. I myself noticed many around me bemoaning the very same complaint as the snare drum was slowly hit in a ‘test-shot’ minute after minute pattern… after another minute… and yet another minute.. next switched to the splash, to the ride… the tom-tom’s. I mean, for fuck’s sakes… I practically wanted to just run back outside and start doing some of the speed I had just passed up from some snaggle-toothed street hood! Goddamn electric!

My advice to whoever was responsible for this, instead of having the big roadie guy, from the cracked-open curtains every two minutes, flash a ridiculously bright blue pen-light at the sound guy stationed above us all, constantly raising his fist upward toward the ceiling, much like an ‘air traffic controller’ does on the tarmac while navigating flight landing jet crafts, maybe it would be best to actually have someone on the floor as a ‘go-between’ to actually inform these two geniuses that the sound levels were actually too low or too high from the ‘actual’ audience perspective. I assessed that as soon as the mighty Goatwhore finally took the stage at well after the 11PM hour (which is a whole other sore subject for me… hang tight on that one!) this wasn’t going to be a Goat performance to end all Goat performances. And you know what, even though this was the first time I’d seen these guys live, I was completely right! And my opinion was backed up outside the venue afterward by several people who watched the set. The vocal level was way too high in the mix. It left Duet’s awesome doomsday ala punk’d up to the death sounding guitar attack TOTALLY LIMP BIZKIT! And that to me was the most horrifying spectacle of this Friday the 13th. Because Duet plays one evil guitar. This cannot be stolen away from this musical mastermind. Goatwhore sucked it up as the pros that they are, and for that I truly commend mainly Falgoust, for something tells me he knew things weren’t going right during the marathon soundcheck. And I can tell you that because I am a trained musician and a former roadie… and I know when the sound on a microphone has been tweaked one notch too high to make the vocalist stop griping and get the show started for the sake of it all. And this was exactly the sad case here. Goatwhore launched full-fueled into songs from each of their memorable and underground classic Eclipse of Ages, Funeral Dirge and Haunting Curse albums. Falgoust is clearly one of metal’s most dedicated showman. He is like a perfect cross-breed of Philip Anselmo and Bruce Dickinson, in the way that he sings the uncanny serial killer growl and moves around as if he is some actor in a stage play gone terribly awry. The passionately demented and gruesomely perverse ‘Invert The Virgin’ seemed to be the one song from their set that hit the mark for me the best with Duet and the other band members finding their stride just right with eachother. TMD Rocks!

This is a band that can hold its own obviously against pretty much the titans of the game today like Slayer, Sepultura, Aborted and Superjoint Ritual on any given night, but I fully believe the fact that a lot of the ‘spirit’ they normally get at their shows was sorely missing… and this is profoundly backed up with Falgoust himself yelling at the mainly motionless ‘stage area’ crowd made up of the every so often ‘dude being pushed into another dude’ sorry excuse of a mosh pit with these words: “Come on. Start fucking going off, you homos!”After Goatwhore concluded their forty five minutes ( I highly doubt it was anywhere close to an hour… and believe me, for this I am actually thankful… not for me, but for Goatwhore!) people started to leave the floor and file outside. It was already getting past the midnight hour or around there, heading on its way eventually towards the 1AM mark and the headliner 1349, who was still to come. I myself needed to splittsville so that I could get some much needed sleep (I still did not get home until close to 2AM) and found that from the several others I ran into outside and shared metal shop talk (my fave thing to do in the world anyway) bumming cigarette after the next, that these young teenagers needed to bail out cause they lived far away in Chinatown and needed to get on the last metro rail… so they themselves couldn’t stay for the headliner even. This is just flatout poor time scheduling in my mind. Why would any headliner go on this late? It makes NO SENSE. And unfortunately, not much of this Friday The 13th DID make any damn sense to me. Goatwhore remains one of metal’s brightest lights and I for one cannot wait to see them at a better managed club venue like The House of Blues or even The Viper Room here in the land of lost souls and the trendy-outfitted opportunistic whores. TMD Rocks!