April 9, 2003

THE BAY AREA Thrash Fest touched down March 29 at the Avalon Ballroom, bringing with it a sold-out crowd (estimated male-female ratio: nine to one), the Hell's Angels (handling stage security; I kid you not), eight bands, and more than seven hours of metal. More than any sane person could possibly stand.

Despite the genre-specific name, this too-big-for-its-own-good festival actually represented several distinct waves in metal's historical (d)evolution. It all started – following a two-hour delay and an overlong set by "opening opening band" Social Evil – with a trio of gory death metal bands: locals Impaled and Exhumed and San Diego-based Locust spin-offs Cattle Decapitation. Thanks to the cavernous room (way bigger than any of these bands is used to playing) and the absence of any sound-checking, you had to use your imagination for everything besides the vocals and the piercing, treble-heavy drums. Still, each of these quartets managed to distinguish itself: Impaled with their hilarious, audience-baiting between-song banter; Cattle Decapitation with vocalist Travis Ryan's skillfully nauseating vocals (and, on a less positive note, drummer Dave Astor's stiff, polka-like beats); and Exhumed with their gung ho, sarcastically humorous sense of metal showmanship (after the first song they turned their guitars around and held them up backward to reveal the words "death," "fuckin'," and "metal," like cheerleaders).

Starting with the next three bands – Vio-Lence, Death Angel, and Testament, all representatives of the Bay Area's late-'80s speed metal glory days – the set changeovers started taking longer, the sound got better, and the applause got louder. It says something about the loyalty of metal fans that even a journeyman, second-tier group such as Vio-Lence can still draw a big, lighters-in-the-air response from an audience -- considering they originally broke up in 1993 and have since reformed without founding guitarist Rob Flynn (who went on to Machine Head). Vio-Lence's proto-funk-thrash, backward-baseball-caps-and-wallet-chains approach to metal has never really been my thing, but being a nice guy, I was willing to give the ol' noncommittal "good at what they do" assessment. That is, until they stepped up midway through the set and dedicated a song to a friend or a relative in the Marines who was "on his way to Kuwait to kill a bunch of fuckin' bastards." Whoa. I got even more depressed when a decent portion of the crowd actually cheered.

On a happier note, Death Angel, the last band I watched all the way through before fully succumbing to metal fatigue, played a great set that was the clear highlight of the night's later bands. (Sacrilegiously, some might say, I bailed at 12:45 a.m., nearly eight hours into the night, and missed the headliner, the mighty Halford). First of all, the guys in Death Angel must be working out and living clean these days, because when they hit the stage, they didn't look like a band who put out their last album in 1990 and called it quits soon after. Bassist Dennis Pepa resembled a metal Joe Strummer, rocking a spiky Mohawk and a plain white wife-beater and somehow getting away with it. Ditto for vocalist Mark Osegueda, who had on black leather pants and dreadlocks down to his ass. His voice was in equally good shape, as he had no trouble at all hitting the piercing, wailing high notes that are, for so many bands in this style, an all-important sign of power.

They stuck mostly to songs from their 1987 debut, The Ultra-Violence, and its follow-up, 1989's Frolic Through the Park, only briefly dipping into their last album, Act III. As speed metal goes, Death Angel didn't possess the absolutely savage heaviness of Slayer or the epic songwriting ability of Metallica. But they still wrote some cool songs and knew how to insert those strategic riff change-ups and gear-shifting tempo switches so they would kick in right when they should. Their performance on this night was energetic and on the money throughout, right down to the background vocals – at least, when the mics were actually working.