UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS / BLOOD CEREMONY | LIVE REVIEW
The Globe, Cardiff, Thurs 24 Jan
Even someone who could make a good case for the continued contemporary relevance of classic heavy metal would be left dumbfounded by Blood Ceremony. 2019 may be crying out for many things, but not, I’d say with some confidence, a Hammer Horror Jethro Tull. The Canadian band consist of three blokes churning out schlocky rock over which a catsuited frontwoman, Alia O’Brien, plays keyboard and flute and sings Tolkien-meets-Aleister-Crowley magickal guff. If they do ever succeed in summoning up Satan, guaranteed he’ll have come primarily for a good chuckle.
And yet Blood Ceremony’s complete and utter preposterousness is precisely what makes them both watchable and memorable, whether intentionally or not. There are, it has to be said (despite my better judgement), worse things than half an hour spent in their company – and by that I don’t mean an hour spent in their company.
Equally stuck (very willingly) in the past are headliners Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, whose brand of heaviness seems curiously quaint in comparison to The Cosmic Dead and Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, to name just two other stoner-ish bands to have passed through Cardiff in the last year. Play Sunn o))) to most of this crowd and they’d shit out their internal organs in terror.
And yet when the band first go full-on slo-mo Sabbath with Mt Abraxas, three songs in, I’m instantly as much of a nodding dog as the next man. Better still is its immediate successor, Mind Crawler, which roars along on a supercharged Stooges riff and is performed against a montage of images of motorbike gangs, drugs, guns, hippies and Charles Manson which might as well be subtitled “It’s 1969 OK, all across the USA”.
It’s at about this point in proceedings that I’m befriended by a gentleman whose joviality and enthusiasm are only exceeded by his inebriation. No sooner has he suggested that Uncle Acid sound like Iron Maiden – an assertion for which there has been no evidence whatsoever – than they launch into Blood Runner and 13 Candles, all symphonic guitar and yomping rhythms. In vodka veritas, it seems.
Into the encore, and cackling frontman K.R. Starrs dedicates Evil Love to someone on a stag do, while a punter attempts to cool himself down by dipping his fingers into his pint and drizzling his forehead with lager. It makes about as much sense as anything else has this evening.
words BEN WOOLHEAD