A Rob Zombie performance is something I've wanted to experience since I was a teenager. Beginning in middle school, horror movies were an obsession, and as a penchant for the dark and scary began to carry over into musical choices, Rob Zombie was an early gateway drug to heavier and more brutal things. His lyrics peppered with references to the very movies that consumed most every thought in my head, he spoke my language for most of high school. The last couple of albums and films from him weren't quite up to snuff, but Hellbilly Deluxe is never far from the rotation here, and after watching hundreds of YouTube clips of the fire, quite possibly brimstone, and robots that decorate his stage shows, the desire to see that in person still remained.
Basically, they didn't need to sell it that hard, but pairing him on a co headlining tour with my favorite band, now reunited with the guitar player that hooked me into them in the first place, put the Night of the Living Dreads tour way over the top on the anticipation meter, and that was before they added Joey Jordison's Scar the Martyr as an opener. This seems an odd way to promote something, but this show was such an event that the anxiety attack I had while trying to negotiate uncooperative companies and timeframes for the two meet and greets beforehand was that much more unbearable. Didn't these people understand that adrenaline was coursing through my veins? Don't stress me out, I'm a live wire here!
In case the point hasn't been made yet, the day didn't start off well. We should all wish that our bad days could end with shows like this.
When reviewing Scar the Martyr's self titled debut album, I expressed concerns over how produced and enhanced Henry Derek's vocals sounded and wondered how they'd hold up in a live setting without Rhys Fulber nearby. I can now tell you from experience that he does a fine job, but I still find myself a bit ambivalent about Martyr as a whole. As fun as it is to listen to Joey Jordison on disc, watching him beat on the kit in person is a whole other ball game, and that's worth the price of admission, I just wish the material, which he produced ostensibly by himself, and the band he picked to perform it were a bit more compelling. The song choices were also a bit odd. Original single Blood Host was picked, but Soul Disintegration, the second and by far the best song on the album, was not. The "deep" cuts that they picked to fill out the setlist weren't particularly memorable, and all erred on the side of melodic as opposed to heavy, which doesn't exactly get a crowd pumped up. I was pleased to be able to see Joey play drums, because I'm skeptical that I'll ever get to see him play with Slipknot, but outside of that novelty at this point I'm not sure I'd be interested in some of the headlining tours I've seen advertised for them.
Evidentally, Korn and Rob Zombie switched spots back and forth on this tour, but on this particular evening it might've served Rob well to say "Y'know what? I'll just get it out of the way right now". From the opening notes of Blind, at least those that were audible above the screaming, it was clear who the crowd was here to see, and they did not seem to come out of the evening disappointed. When Korn came through Fargo last year, they put on a good enough performance that clearly demonstarted that they'd emerged from the dark times that followed Head's departure, and now with Head back in the band and a sold out arena in front of them, they successfully erased any memory of those times and brought us straight back to the nineties. If the fencing surrounding Ray Luzier's drum kit had been expanded to include a stage, one could have been forgiven for thinking we'd actually stepped through a time machine back to the original Family Values tour. The songs may be newer, but the energy is the same old school, youthful rage that a group of twenty something misfits brought out in the nineties. Even the appearance of a fan on stage, the now ominpresent security concern plaguing the entire industry after Randy Blythe's trial, couldn't stop Korn's momentum. As Head and Munky's guitars played off each other and Jonathan Davis raged and screamed, the captive audience in the Bismarck Civic Center witnessed that rarest of events, a band recapturing their moment in the sun. Korn's fifteen minutes just got extended to at least twenty, and judging by the screams of the six thousand, a further extension may be in order.
After weeks of proclaiming to my friend, a non Zombie fan, that the show would be worth it just for the fireworks, it was a little dismaying to discover there would in fact be none. In fact, there wouldn't be any dancers or robots either. While anticlimactic in these regards, the show that Mr. Zombie put on was still a memorable affair. I don't think the idea of shooting balloons into the crowd during the cover of Grand Funk Railroad's We're an American Band really paid off, unless Rob intended to spend the evening fending them off with his mic stand as the crowd merely sent them back towards the stage instead of dispersing them amongst themselves, but Zombie doing laps around the arena while John 5 played a furious solo on a glow in the dark guitar was the kind of memorable moment you just don't see at every show. The nostalgic glory vibe set by Korn continued into Mr. Zombie's set, which other than three songs off of the most recent album consisted only of material at least twelve years old and beyond, but given the reaction it appears that Dragula and Thunder Kiss '65 won't be going into retirement any time soon.
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