Crematorium / The Judas Cradle / Frost Like Ashes
The Bottleneck, Lawrence, KS
April 24, 2004
This was an interesting show. For starters, when was the last time you ever went to a club to see a metal show IN THE AFTERNOON?!?! The sun was still out for God’s sake! But it wasn’t too early to have a Sam Adams though.
I quaffed the finely brewed ale and headed up front where
Frost Like Ashes opened things up with vocalist Azahel rasping out the intro passage to “A Cruel Verse”. After that, they played a short set consisting of new songs like “Desecrator”, “Lord of Darkness”, and “Shattered Gods”. You could hear the guitar, bass, and vocals, but the drums were slightly undermic’d. You could see Adonijah blasting away but you pretty much only heard the snare, toms, and cymbal crash. The double-bass was almost nonexistent. Oh well, it still sounded better than the drums on
St Anger.
Next was a band called
The Judas Cradle. Never heard of these kids, but after perusing their site, I was prepared to be unimpressed. The music reminded me of sub-par
Hatebreed material. They had the crunch, some heavy riffs here and there, but the screaming hardcore/metal thing doesn’t do a lot for me, except maybe make me want to stick my head in a nest full of pissed off hornets. Interesting stage show though. One of the guitarists was running around like a monkey climbing on top of the amps, and jumping from monitor to monitor like Pitfall Harry pouncing off the alligator heads. The vocalist was out on the floor facing the band on stage. It’s like they were playing for him, and he was singing for them. Didn’t catch any song titles. As a matter of fact the only thing I caught was bits of between song banter like “Fuck Jesus” or “I’d like to dedicate this song to boobies…because I like ‘em” They played a quick set because they had another show to play in Kansas City (an hour away). I’ll give ‘em an E for effort, but if I don’t dig on the style…feh!
The headlining band,
Crematorium, was quite entertaining. The music was more tolerable than the previous band, but what made this set fun enjoyable was how much fun the band was having on stage. Booing each other between songs, and the humorous quips by the vocalist when introducing the next song. It’s like he was temporarily possessed by the spirit of Billy Milano. We were laughing our collective balls (or whatever) off. A personal favorite was the tongue-in-cheek introduction to one of their songs…”This is a death metal song. It's called….*mumblegrrrrrtrwarrwwlgrrrrawwrbbmgl*” I could have sworn I heard the words “Twinkie”, “Necrosis”, and “Urethra” in there somewhere.
All three bands shared one thing in common though...being cynical over the size of the crowd and the time of day they were playing. There were MAYBE 40-50 people that showed up. That plus the fact that it was an afternoon show was a bit silly. I’m just curious as to what was going on at the venue that night, since all the bands didn’t even play a 30 minute set. Must have been something BIG!! Maybe The Bottleneck was having one of their retro dance nights, open mic performances, or fetish shows!!! To sum up the event, one of my friends so succinctly proclaimed, “Boy was I thrilled to pay $8.00 to see three bands warm up!”
