The Savage Imperial Death March Part II tour stopped in Orlando, Florida, on Friday for a night of crowd-pleasing, eclectic heavy rock from icons that have played sweaty clubs for decades. But before the rocking, the night opened with a strange set by Dark Sky Burial, a side project of Napalm Death bassist Shane Embury.
Embury played programmed ambient music while occasionally tapping out beats on electronic drums and shouting hypnotic chants into the microphone. The droning noise constantly swelled, evoking a soundtrack to an experimental horror film or the background music while walking through a haunted house. Most fans didn’t know what to do with the music — you can’t mosh or head-bang to ambient drone — so they watched and waited for something interesting to happen. Dark Sky Burial is an odd choice to open a loud rock show, but odd decisions aren’t that surprising with these bands.
North Carolina sludge metal band Weedeater riled up the confused crowd with a set of raucous metal. The trio’s music, characterized by shifting tempos and atypical rhythms, is inspired by the Melvins. The band’s set focused on two albums, 2007’s God Luck and Good Speed and 2011’s Jason… the Dragon. Bassist Dave Collins screamed and shrieked while laying down rumbling grooves matched by guitarist Dave Shepherd. Collins played with an antagonistic attitude, punching his bass and his head, flipping off the crowd, and introducing the songs as if they were inside jokes. “This is a song about a goddamn sandwich,” he said before the band tore into “Turkey Warlock.”
A circle pit formed and lasted throughout most of the set. Weedeater’s stoner metal was thick and powerful, with bludgeoning grooves and walls of feedback that bookended each song. The band’s tour manager, Ben Jones, joined them onstage and handled the vocals on “Time Served,” offering a different scream than Collins’s. Weedeater closed their set with a fiery rendition of “Weed Monkey” that started ultra slow and exploded into a fast jam.
Melvins gave the best performance of the night with a mix of heavy songs spanning the band’s 42 years. The pioneers of sludge metal and the Seattle grunge scene usually are a trio, but Big Business drummer Coady Willis joined Dale Crover to double the drums. Melvins’ sound is built around distinct cadences, often in odd time signatures with frequent tempo shifts, and the two-drum attack added even more heft to the powerful rhythmic attacks. Crover and Willis stayed in sync all night, including on complicated drum fills, except for a couple of drum solo battles where they traded off and tried to one-up each other.
Buzz Osborne prowled the stage and ripped through iconic guitar riffs, alternating between slow chugs, speed metal thrash, and histrionic solos. His booming baritone brought welcome melody to songs like “Billy Fish” and “It’s Shoved.” Steven McDonald played thick bass grooves and sang, provided backing vocals, and sang lead on the groove jam “A History of Bad Men.” Though every song was heavy, the eclectic set showcased Melvins’ ability to produce an endless variety of heavy sounds. “Blood Witch” was an achingly slow grind, while the frenetic “Honey Bucket” had Osborne and McDonald wowing the crowd with blistering riffs. The mid-tempo chugging riffs of “Revolve” perfected the middle ground between those extremes. The band closed the 70-minute set with a dynamic rendition of “Your Blessened,” which shifted speeds and careened between loud and soft moments, ending with Crover and Willis pounding through a bone-rattling drum-off.
It’s hard to top the eclectic, virtuoso performances of a Melvins set, and Napalm Death wasn’t able to do that, but they ended the show with a set that dialed everything up to its most extreme. There was no nuance or variety. Everything was loud, fast, and aggressive. Though no founding members remain in Napalm Death, singer Barney Greenway and drummer Danny Herrera have been with the band since 1989 and 1991, respectively.
Some fans left after the Melvins’ performance, but the majority that remained moshed and head-banged to Napalm Death’s furious set of unrelenting grindcore power. The band’s feral energy on breakneck ragers like “Contagion” and “Multinational Corporations, Part II” created a frenzied atmosphere with undercurrents of danger. Greenway was in perpetual motion, only stopping for between-song banter. At all other times, he skanked, paced like a caged animal, and nervously clutched his head, always with the body language of someone in the middle of a breakdown.
“You may be wondering what we’re doing up here making all this horrendous noise,” Greenway said a few songs in. Between songs, Greenway made political statements against Trump, capitalism, and the UK government. He introduced “Suffer the Children” as being about “the little people making these things in a factory that are supposed to make our lives better, but they don’t.”
Guitarist John Cooke hammered through rapid-fire riffs over Herrera’s hyperkinetic jackhammer drums while Greenway unleashed unintelligible throaty screams. If the Melvins set was about eclectic rhythms and musicianship, the Napalm Death set was about savage fury. What it lacked in nuance, it made up for in raw aggression, and for fans on the same wavelength, the grindcore veterans kept the momentum going and closed the frenzied show on a high note.
