At the blink of an eye, the Newport Music Hall was transformed into a frickin’ reptile zoo as Avenged Sevenfold made its triumphant entry Monday night. And somebody was giving booze to these wild animals.
But before the mayhem truly began, the crowd needed a raw primer of heavy metal energy supplied by the Philadelphia area band, CKY. CKY is accompanying Avenged on the Cities of Evil tour that started just this month.
CKY didn’t have any special fog machines or lights. The band simply walked on stage as the PA blared Whitney Huston’s “I Will Always Love You” – a fitting song to contrast perfectly with the machine gun riffs that ensued as CKY burst into its first song of the night. The band members were no stranger to jumping from one end of the stage to the other with an instrument over and behind their heads.
The love for Huston songs over the PA kept going as the band would take a break between each song to tune, because the guitar players played so hard a break to tune was necessary after each song.
As CKY closed out its set, the anticipation for Avenged was about as thick as the putrid smell of body sweat and popcorn in the music hall. But – as if the crowd weren’t hyped up enough to begin with – Ronni Hunter, the all-too-familiar DJ from 99.7 the Blitz, made an appearance to set a powder keg in the middle of the mosh pit set to explode.
Then, the lights were cut. The stage filled with fog. The brave made their way to the pit. And the strobe lights began to flash as Avenged’s singer, M. Shadows, suddenly appeared through the fog and – in the immortal words of Jack Black – “rocked hard tasty abs washboard style.”
The band seemed bigger than life. It was something about the way its set was put together and the fact that Avenged’s sound was louder than even CKY’s. The band played all the greats from its latest album, “City of Evil.” The crowd, obviously, knew every song and sang each lyric with Shadows, creating an atmosphere of movement that sent tennis shoes in every direction.
But it got worse. The pit grew tenfold when the band suddenly broke into Pantera’s “Walk.”
At the sound of the first riff (the one that defines ass-whooping), every soul in the building raised their fist and pumped as if one huge goblet of rock was being raised in tribute to the beloved Dimebag.
As the song pumped on, the walls of the Newport pulsed and I would not be surprised if part of the crowd got spit out the front being lost in the movement of the pit.
Throughout the rest of Avenged’s set, the band snuck in small riffs from past metal bands as tribute obvious influences. One small break in the set was filled with the band’s rendition of the Guns ‘n Roses favorite, “Paradise City,” which left the crowd yearning for a full rendition that never came. Nonetheless, Avenged satisfied the metal bone in every body of the crowd by playing nearly every song of “City of Evil.”
According to the tour’s Web site, the Cities of Evil tour made its way to Bogart’s in Cincinnati for Tuesday night and westward from there. Most shows have sold out in the U.S. already. The tour, then, moves to Europe – without CKY – by the end of the month. Get all this information and more at www.avengedsevenfold.com.
