Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats
-GORILLA, MANCHESTER-
For the first time ever when walking into Gorilla, I head straight upstairs to watch a gig with the risk of getting a elbow to the face in a mosh pit.
Catching the majority of the opening band’s set, I wasn’t getting the feeling that I was ready to watch Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats. Watching Blood Ceremony, I feel like I am watching a female vocalist with a set of session musicians behind her. It is a weird set, doom mental mixed with grout rock. One minute a dude is ripping out a Slash-type solo, the next there is a flute solo. For me it doesn’t really work. They’ve got several albums released so they must have a good fanbase but for me they are not the band to warm up the headline act.
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats hit the stage with the opening track to their latest album Wasteland. I was expecting that the second the band started to play the crowd would erupt into a mosh from hell. All I can see is 350 nodding up and down, it is bizarre. Maybe it is just because a lot of the crowd haven’t bothered to listen to their latest album.
‘Waiting for Blood’ is their second song off a much older album and finally I see some proper headbanging and even a couple of guys at the front jumping up and down. It looks like they have managed to warm the crowd up by the end of the track.
I’m going to be honest, the set isn’t the most exciting of rock gigs I’ve attended. A lot of the time it just feels like one long song. A track that really catches my attention, due to its change in tempo, is ‘Pusher Man’, also from the same album as ‘Waiting for Blood’. I can hear the lyrics and living in Manchester with the rumours of the so called “pusher” is darkly exciting. The audience is feeling it too, it is a belter of a track.
The highlight of their main set is for me ‘I’ll Cut You Down’; it’s straight out of the doom rock manifesto. Something I could have imagined Sabbath releasing in the 70s. Leading me on to my admiration for The Deadbeats’ rock solid rhythm section, they are tight and play relentlessly hard. As a drummer myself I enjoy trying to improvise a fill here and there. This dude just hits the drums as hard as he can for a hour and a half. His wrists must be like tree trunks.
Throughout the whole set they had a great visual display behind them. The encore is impressive: ‘Evil Love’, which borderlines into trash metal, gets the crowd moving. Just quick heavy power chords and a series of great solos, it ends the night on a high. That song is straight into my Spotify favourites playlist. I thought that was it, but then of course they shout down the mic, “We’ve got one more Manchester” – ‘No Return’, also off their latest album.
The set ends quite beautifully with the drummer and bassist leaving the stage and the two I’d say almost joint front men jamming away and harmonising together, similar to what the Chili Peppers Flea and John Frusciante used to do at the end of a set.
All in all I can’t complain, it was a loud rock gig and it was definitely my cup of tea just not quite a show I’d write home about.
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats: Official | Facebook
