“Fat, balls and hair.”
No, that’s not the teaser for a Tad reunion tour, it’s the tag line for Paris’ “Stoned Gatherings,” a regular gig held in the Glazart club to showcase the scummiest, druggiest metal passing through the French capital.
The description is fitting (it’s “Du gras, des couilles et des poils” in the original, in case you’re the rare head-banging Francophile), for the shows feature much—and little else—of all three. One can understand the logic behind the choice of venue: the Glazart is a former bus station converted into a sheet-metal dive, sitting adjacent to a highway overpass and a homeless soup kitchen. This isn’t Parisian glamour; it’s biker grit.
Tonight, the greasers adhere to the club’s dress code, donning their leather and—get this—jean jackets with band patches. The one exception is a slim figure wearing a pig mask. Actually, one hopes it was a mask; I suppose it could have been Renée Zellweger.
If the audience conforms to a vapid stereotype, Acid King is a Jungian archetype—a universal unconscious ideal of the lethargic burn-out, toking a path of blissful oblivion through a life filled with pain. The California trio may sport the traditional battle gear of metal (long hair and tats), but it is so primal and unassuming that bands with whom the threesome shares the bill appear to pose with false bravado in comparison.
Sonically, Acid King plays in a register lower than a dead elephant’s wrinkled taint. Guitarist Lori S. relies largely on barre chords, resulting in a distorted mush that is blunted but wide. She may not have des couilles, but this Acid Queen sure plays like she does. Taken collectively, the group’s sound is thick, colossal and almost impossibly bottom-heavy. These guys are the Brontosaurus-shaped Weeble of stoner metal. Their music strips the Melvins’ catalogue of everything except the plodding riffs and muscular sludge, and they’ve replaced King Buzzo’s gloriously grating malevolence with a hypnotic, inexorable drone. They do not (or at least, no longer) impose on the listener a cartoonishly doom-and-gloom vision of Hell; everything from their stage demeanor to their actual music is matter-of-fact, natural.
Their relaxed confidence is on full display tonight. “On To Everafter” and the anthemic “2 Wheel Nation” (both from their 2005 masterpiece of muck, III) are casual yet triumphant. Driving the band’s performance is Joey Osbourne’s spectacular drumming. He is dynamic yet disciplined, workman-like, triangulating a style somewhere between Keith Moon, John Bonham and Bill Ward.
Repeated requests from the audience for “Evil Satan” from first album Zoroaster went unanswered. This may have been for the best, since the group’s early output often came off as empty posturing and toothless goth-mongering. But with its later work, the trio has found its identity: Lori’s vocals now seamlessly absorbed into the mix, the band has evolved into a much more convincing and powerful unit. It has realized that thunderous Sabbath riffs and Sleep-y doom is most viscerally combined with soft, trippy vocals rather than the stridency of tough-guy boogeyman barking.
Perhaps the group’s one misstep of the night is the meaningless flourishes of wah bass, crowbarred into a couple of songs with little payoff. (A bit like when Marvel Comics introduced Flatman, the lamest superhero in the X-Men pantheon, probably in an equally lame and non-sequitur attempt to impress a woman obsessed with the comic franchise.)
As Acid King’s set winds down, Lori slips off her guitar and retires to the side of the stage, one hand holding a beer and the other tucking a thumb into her pocket. She watches with admiration, as the entire audience does, while Osbourne delivers his stunning drum outro to “Sunshine And Sorrow.” At his final slap of the skins, an unexpected silence overtakes the room, which the audience immediately fills with a gasp of pleasure and a rousing ovation. Osbourne rises from his stool, offers a sheepish smile and nods to the crowd.
There is no chest-thumping, fist-pumping, or finger-pointing. Acid King came to do a job, and it fucking nailed it. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
—Eric Bensel
