We were late getting into the venue, as we decided to eat before going in and as a result, missed Soilent Green unfortunately. I’ve never been a big fan of the band, but yet I wanted to see them, as seeing a live band can sometimes sway my opinion of them – oh well.

While settling into the sold out show and getting a beer, Chimaira opened their set with “Pure Hatred” from 2004’s Impossibility of Reason to a great crowd response. This marked the third time I have seen them – in the past, they put on a highly energetic show, but due to the smaller stage and Dethklok’s gear taking up much of it, their movement was rather restricted. It wasn’t much of an issue though, as vocalist Mark Hunter is a tried and true frontman who has shown me three times now that he knows how to work a crowd. Outside of “Pure Hatred”, they ripped through about 7 or 8 more songs split up from their last three albums including “Nothing Remains”, “Power Trip”, “Salvation”, “No Reason to Live”, “The Flame” as well as one or two more I can’t quite name, and closed the show out with “Resurrection”. The only complaint I have is scattered throughout their set were some incredibly loud bass-drops that literally made my head ring and detracted from the show somewhat. Other than that, their sound was great and they put on a good performance despite the lack of on stage space.

Dethklok – their show began with some fresh (made exclusively for the tour from the looks of it) Metalocalyspe material projected onto a big screen before the real life Dethklok (Brendon Small – guitar/vocals – creator of the show, writer of all music/lyrics sans drums as well as the voice of Nathan Explosion, Pickles and Skwisgaar Skwigelf, and Gene Hoglan on drums as well as two others to represent Murderface and Toki Wartooth (I don’t know their names and I’m too lazy to look it up) came on stage to a riotous crowd. They kicked things off with the Metalocalypse theme followed by “Briefcase Full of Guts”, accompanied by the (extended) video for the song in the episode that it appeared in. This was one of the few times where previous Metalocalypse material was used during their performance, as most of it was new, and each song had it’s own video – pretty cool, as the onstage movements of the band were rather nonexistent, instead shifting focus to the projector screen. The timing was impeccably perfect – the onscreen mouth movements were completely in time the vocals of Small – quite impressive.

They would play two songs then show various clips of random shit between the pairs, such as a hilarious “rules of the pit” segment, and a breakdown of the “behind the scenes” workings of a Dethklok show which was equally funny. Their setlist was comprised of “Awaken”, “Bloodrocuted”, “Castratikron”, “Go Forth and Die”, “Murmaider”, “Thunderhorse”, “Birthday Dethday”, “Hatredcopter”, “Dethharmonic” the Duncan Hills Coffee jingle, and initial show closer “Go Into the Water”. After the last song, the lights went out and Brendon Small went into a hilarious schizo conversation with himself as he traded voices between Nathan, Pickles and Skwisgaar on whether or not “they” were going to do another song – it all boiled down to how loud the crowd got and after a thunderous response, they launched into “Face Fisted” to officially close out the show.

I must say I was rather impressed with the entire presentation – it was akin to watching a play backed by a movie representation and quite honestly, was one of the best and most unique concert experiences I’ve ever had. If you’re a fan of the show, I highly recommend checking out the live show if they come through your area.