It’s truthful to say that in case you are somebody as deeply in love with the worlds of punk rock and heavy metallic, and their relationship with the worlds of the horrific and the arcane, then September 18, 2016, was a fairly particular date for you. It was on this present day, at Douglas Park, in Chicago, Illinois, that, after lastly burying the hatchet, unique Misfits Jerry Solely and Glenn Danzig, alongside Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein and former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, took the stage at Riot Fest to play the songs which have lengthy since handed into folklore. What might presumably high that, then? Oh, perhaps simply Rob Zombie additionally sitting on the invoice, performing White Zombie’s Astro-Creep: 2000 dwell in its entirety.
Additionally on the line-up that day was SoCal punk veterans Unhealthy Faith, Sacramento post-metal legends Deftones and a reformed Sleater-Kinney, the vastly influential all-girl indie trio, complementing the mouth-watering prospect of seeing the returning icons of horror-punk. Filling the spot straight earlier than Misfits took to the stage, nevertheless, was the person that had taken the 80s schlock-punk of the headliners and ramped it up, each aesthetically and sonically, over the many years of their absence.
Having Rob Zombie open for Misfits simply is sensible. The trainer and the pupil collectively in a single gloriously Technicolor, orgasmic, sensory overload. A celebration in extra of extra. However, for such a exceptional set of circumstances, Rob Zombie wanted to do one thing out of the strange to mark the event. Naturally, he made life tough for the headliners by operating by way of the 1995 album that basically put him on the map.
We might go into nice salivating element about simply why Astro-Creep: 2000 is the nice White Zombie (and presumably Rob Zombie) second, however we’re positive you’re all conversant in the grindhouse, sleaze, industrialized throbs, and chainsaw riffing on “Grease Paint And Monkey Brains,” “More Human Than Human” or “Super-Charger Heaven.” Principally, it’s a basic, and if seeing Misfits dwell wasn’t sufficient, seeing the most effective albums of the 90s performed to completion turned the important into the unmissable.
In fact, as a lot as hundreds of thousands of us would have cherished to have been there, we couldn’t all discover our approach into that subject in Chicago on that exact day. However Zombie’s efficiency was captured as a historic doc and launched, slightly below two years later, underneath the guise of Astro-Creep: 2000 Stay.
It’s a report that proves two issues: firstly, that basic albums actually are timeless. The songs nonetheless pop and champagne and grind in all of the locations that they did when initially launched in ’95. The best way Zombie and his band profession out of the traps on the opening of “El Phantasmo And The Chicken-Run Blast-O-Rama” would give any of the fashionable riff masters a bloody nostril, and “Electric Head Pt 1 (The Agony)” nonetheless sounds leaps and bounds forward of most modern metallic bands.
The second factor it proves is simply how a lot tighter, sooner, and extra uncompromising Rob Zombie has change into through the years. There’s barely a pause for breath between songs, to the purpose the place you’ll be able to nearly hear the viewers struggling to catch up because the vitality of the music tears off into the horizon. “More Human Than Human” is virtually performed at twice the velocity of its recorded unique, and its electrical pulse has gone from being a soundscape within the background to a sonic volcano that sounds prefer it’s rumbling the core of the Earth.
Not like most dwell albums, Astro-Creep: 2000 Stay does that rarest of issues: it truly captures not only a nice band with nice songs, however an excellent second in time and an precise occasion on this planet of heavy music. It’s extremely uncertain that anybody will neglect about what occurred at Riot Fest in 2016; its place within the mythology of heavy music is most positively assured. But it surely’s listening to that day, that band, on that kind; that setlist, from an artist stepping away from what’s normally anticipated of him and giving the folks one thing genuinely memorable, that makes Astro-Creep: 2000 Stay such a brilliantly dizzy deal with for followers.
The message to Misfits was clear: comply with that!
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