Less than three weeks after fellow New Orleans metal veterans Exhorder passed through Paris with Overkill, and only days after Corrosion of Conformity played Petit Bain, Crowbar arrive to complete a particularly heavy run of Southern sludge and groove.
Kirk Windstein, sole remaining original member and unquestioned captain of the ship, walks on with the rest of the band, plugs in and spends a good ten minutes soundchecking everything himself. No entrance, no ceremony, no bullshit. It gives the audience a useful chance to recover from Black Bomb A’s devastating opening set, and for a moment it even seems possible that following the French hardcore band might be a difficult proposition. Then the first burst of feedback comes out of Windstein’s amp.
Despite the slow, doomy weight of the music, the crowd immediately goes apeshit. “Self-Inflicted” and “High Rate Extinction” make for a particularly ugly opening pair, both drawn from the band’s second album, and Windstein spends much of the set in his usual curmudgeonly mode, demanding that the room get louder, crazier and rowdier. The room is more than happy to oblige.
For the next eighty minutes, Crowbar move between old favourites and newer material in a swamp of murky riffs, evil grooves and tempos heavy enough to bend concrete. By the time they close with their menacing version of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter,” the whole thing seems to have gone by remarkably quickly. Then it is over. We have just been hit in the face by a Crowbar.
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