Monday, August 11, 2008

The Metal Masters at PNC Bank Arts Center

MetalSucks pretty much nails the main takeaway of this show in their review: Judas Priest was very good, but Heaven and Hell were so hella awesome they blew Priest off the stage. I'm pretty sure the roof of PNC's big concrete shell was shaking when Dio and crew left the stage and the energy in the room was palpable: openers or no, we all wanted Heaven and Hell to come back out and finish the night with "Neon Knights." If the band doesn't use this groundswell to write a new album, they're soft in the head. The public is ready for much more Dio-fronted Sabbath. A few other notes:
  • Testament started out strong, but their sound fell apart during "The Formation of Damnation" about halfway through their set. Their selection of material wasn't what I would have picked - I was looking forward to hearing "Henchmen Ride" after seeing a troop of guys on motorcycles on the way in - but sound problems aside, I have no real complaints.
  • Motorhead was completely incomprehensible and sounded like they were playing a 200 person club, not a 17,000 person concert shed. I'm guessing that's a part of their "everything louder than everything else" mentality (I've never seen them live before), but I spent most of their set shirt watching.
  • Speaking of shirts (and the rules of appropriate concert t-shirt wear), the winner of Best T-Shirt for this show goes to the guy rocking the vintage Rainbow shirt (because I'm a fairly optimistic person, I'm assuming the shirt was a vintage item and not a "relic" constructed through with the aid of a washing machine full of pebbles), who gets five points out of a possible five and a spot in the Concert T-Shirt Hall of Fame. The bar's been set for the rest of you concert goers.
  • Metalheads are, sad to say, pretty ugly people (yours truly excluded, of course. I'm no model, but I felt pretty good comparing myself to my metal peers). People from the more rural areas of New Jersey are, sad to say, pretty ugly people. Combining the two makes for a whole mass of really fugly people. If a bomb had gone off, the gene pool would have been grateful.

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