Saw SAINT VITUS play this week here in London – what a rush.
Looking even more out-of-time than he did 3 decades ago, greyhead Dave Chandler was so glad to finally have a sizable audience in front him that he played his skittery breaks and white noise solos like he was a giddy teenager. Mark Adams kept his head down, playing his bass smooth and economically. Wino fractured into a wraith of hair, tattoos, and piercing, psychotic eyes halfway through the first song. And new drummer Henry Vasquez was good & effective in a vicious, animalistic sorta way – though I missed Armando Acosta’s languidly loose basskicks that once dragged their records even slower than anyone thought possible. Regardless, when they collectively dug their hooves into songs like “Living Backwards” “Look Behind You” and “The Troll” we knew we were staring at geezers who’d completely changed the sound of rock and roll, for all time.
But can we finally agree to quit with the quips that SAINT VITUS were somehow merely a BLACK SABBATH clone? If BLACK SABBATH were a rich, hearty bowl of minestrone soup, then SAINT VITUS could only be that soup if it was boiled over a high flame all night long, leaving but a viscous sludge stuck the bottom of the pot. And them two meals ain’t nothing like each other. See em live while they still stand, and check out a great, recent interview with Dave Chandler here (so it was OVERKILL who first brought em to the attention of Greg Ginn! Merrill Ward deserves a lifelong pension for such foresight).
Thanks to whenwedie for the killer photo of Vitus live in SF last week
