GWAR at Sunset Station

Late as usual, I got to Sunset Station AFTER Mensrea played, but managed to catch most of A Dozen Furies. I mentioned them before as one of the better bands on the second stage at OzzFest. That time I watched them from up on the hill, but this time I managed to get up close and personal. Typical of most current metal bands, they focus on heavy beats, loud guitar and barking vocals; but unlike the majority of modern metal bands, they also have great guitar melodies and the singer alternates the barking with actual singing...GOOD singing. Once again, I was very impressed with them and thought it was really cool of them when they got the crowd chanting, “GWAR! GWAR! GWAR!” in anticipation of the headlining band.



In case you’ve been in a coma or living out of a dumpster for the last year, A Dozen Furies is the up-and-coming band from Dallas, Texas who won themselves a spot on the last OzzFest tour. You can learn more about them at http://www.adozenfuries.com/

Now, GWAR:

If you already know all about GWAR, you can skip this paragraph. If you don’t, GWAR is a band whose style is known as “splatter metal.” Take that literally. If you go near GWAR, you WILL get splattered...with a substance very like blood (but luckily much more washable). Their name stands for “God, What an Awful Racket!” They are wonderfully gory, vulgar, irreverent, obscene and...funny. Their mythos is basically that they are great warlords created by the Master to help kill his boredom through mutilation and murder. However, they were banished to this god-awful place called Earth for getting too big for their britches and attempting a mutiny. Their only redemption is to awaken the World Maggot, which lives in the center of the Earth, and the way to do this is by massacring humans through their shows, which they do regularly.

Their latest massacre was Tuesday night at Sunset Station, and I was lucky enough to be one of their victims. As they stomped out on stage in their exaggerated medieval war gear, with huge spikes sticking out everywhere, enormous weapons (and enormous fake schlongs), images of death and mutilation everywhere, the crowd went wild. As they began their first song, they also decapitated a guy onstage and his “blood” sprayed out all over the audience...and me. I managed to snap a picture or two before I had to retreat behind the speakers and clean off my camera.



I waited for the carnage to end before I ventured out again and got some great pics of the warlords in action.









Then I got brave (from a bit further away) to snap this one of GWAR disemboweling and beating the “blood” out of everyone’s favorite president.



Unfortunately, they have a rule that press can only take pictures during the first three songs, so I’ll have to leave the rest of the show to your imaginations.

Their next victim was Sharon Osbourne, who kept harping at them that they would never amount to anything, yadda yadda yadda. So, of course, they cut off her breasts and sprayed blood out of the remains of her tata’s all over the crowd. Michael Jackson was the next to put in an appearance. He gave us a bit of high falsetto singing, then gave us a glimpse of his latest (sexual) plastic surgery, in the form of boobs and a 3-foot penis. After some stretching, biting and strangulation of/with said phallic organ, Michael’s face was removed. What was left was a skeletal visage almost as scary as his “real” face, and a quick stab to the throat released Jackson blood out onto the people.

Other visitors onto the stage were some sort of Christmas goblin - a mutant Grinch-looking thing and a large dinosaur that pounded around the stage chewing on the heads of the band members and spewing blood...this time all over the band.

But enough about the theatrics. GWAR is really a band that must be experienced, not described. A little about the music. GWAR has an interesting style of odd, suddenly changing rhythms, solid guitar licks and a vocalist who mostly alternates between screaming and growling, but in a good way. It almost feels like the noise of a battlefield, with the war-drums going, screams and shouting, crescendos and diminuendos, and yet it is miraculously pleasing and harmonious at the same time. Especially on one song near the end where the tempo slowed and a more melodic tone took over (hmmm...maybe it was a Requiem for all our lost souls).

Their last song begun as such and even the stoic “I’m too cool to jump around and scream” people went nuts, and I may not have it word for word, but it went something like this: “Many years ago we came to a little shithole in San Antonio called TacoLand. When we arrived here today we learned that TacoLand had been closed down and the owner shot through the head. This is unacceptable and against the rules of GWAR. Only GWAR is allowed to commit murder. So this last song goes out to TacoLand!.” You’ve never heard so many people scream so loud.

By the way, this tour celebrates 20 years of GWAR (or the time when they emerged from their imprisonment in an iceberg in Antarctica due to all the hairspray used in the ‘80's creating a hole in the ozone layer, releasing them from their prison...whichever way you want to look at it).