So on Friday night, my friends and I went to see Motorhead and Corrosion of Conformity at the Palladium in Worcester, MA. Not necessarily my favorite bands to see, but it was an excuse for a good night out with friends, Motorhead is always a good show, and although I really didn’t know much about CoC, I did know that they the seal of approval from my trusted music friends, so what the hell. I did discover that CoC were the ones that did "Clean my Wounds" back in 1994, a song that I always really liked.
There was another band who opened up the show, by the name of "Zeke" who were…. ummm… let’s see… what’s the word, I’m looking for here….. "atrocious" I think it is. If I had taken a look and listen to the stuff on their web site, I probably would have had higher hopes for them, as they seem to have a decent enough heavy stoner rock sound.
Live though… ouch. For a group of music fans who were there to see CoC and Motorhead, I don’t think they could have been more turned off by some loud rock. One of my friends actually fell asleep during the 90 decibel onslaught, and I think all four of as at some point or another were borderline nodding off it was so boring. Looking around at the rest of the audience, just about everyone had various looks of boredom, frustration and impatience as they just wanted these guys to get off the freakin’ stage.
Zeke’s sound was basically a wall of guitar and drum noise being played as fast as possible while some fucking loser screamed his way over the top of everything. It was about as subtle and nuanced as a sledgehammer upside the fucking head. When Motorhead played, Lemmy sounded like Placido Domingo doing classical arias next to this group of losers.
How a band could create music that is so aggressive, so loud, and so fast and yet still bore an entire audience is beyond me.
Anyway – CoC and Motorhead were much, much better. As I said, Motorhead is a good show, though not one of my favorite all time bands, and CoC has exactly one song that I recognized, but they were both about a million times better than Zeke!!