Less than three weeks after their fellow NOLA-Metal legends Exhorder opened for Overkill at the Trabendo and less than a week after their friends in Corrosion Of Conformity played a career-spanning set at Petit Bain, Sludge Metal legends is also gracing the French capital with their skull-crushing riffs and heavy tempos.
Sole captain at the helm and last man standing from the original line-up Kirk Windstein and his bandmates showed up on stage with no pretense, set up their instruments and sound checked everything themselves for a good ten minutes before the show started. This gave the audience a welcome opportunity to recover from the devastating set by openers Black Bomb A. In fact, for a moment, it was looking like following the French Hardcore band might have been an uphill battle.
But as soon as the first shard of feedback came out of Windstein's amp, and despite the heavy, doomy vibe of the songs, the crowd immediately went apeshit. Then again, how do you resist the two-punch opener of Self-Inflicted and High Rate Exctinction, both culled from the band's eponymous second album? Windstein was his usual curmudgeonly self, admonishing the crowd to get crazier, louder, rowdier... and the crowd was happy to oblige.
The set would then go back and forth between classics and newer tracks for an hour and twenty minutes of murky, evil grooves and would only end after their menacing cover of Led Zeppelin's No Quarter. Before we knew it, it was all over. We had just been hit in the face by a Crowbar.
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