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03/14/2024 12:00 AMI feel sorry for everyone who was not in attendance at the Space Ballroom in Hamden on March 1. Point blank: the best show I’ve been to since Killer Kin tore up Cafe Nine (again) last year in May.
The concert venue walls were shaken by Massachusetts’ Mother Iron Horse, and supergroup Mutoid Man, the openers and headlines, respectively. With superb sound, bodies slamming, drums pounding, and sonic evil permeating the packed crowd, the show achieved the highest honor in my book of giving me a case of tinnitus that didn’t cease until the following afternoon.
Mother Iron Horse took the stage first, and I was immediately hooked. The band had it all: stomping grooves, the elephant-trunk riffs blasting from Orange amplifiers, and the effortless howling of singer Adam Luca, who it turns out is a barber in Peabody, Massachusetts. The musical and aesthetic salad of influences was right up my alley: the doom-and-gloom sludge of the Melvins, Alice in Chains, and old-school Saint Vitus, catharsis that called back to sludge and stoner’s hardcore roots, and images of vintage horror films and The Crucible. Overall, less plodding and more urgent than Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats.
Fittingly, the band is from Salem, Massachusetts. How could ancient horrors not be a part of their identity?
It’s not fitting to call Mother Iron Horse an appetizer for the headliners, giving a stellar performance for this first listener and purchaser of vinyl.
Then came the headlines, Mutoid Man. Their performance was also wonderful, but that’s, of course, by consequence. The three-piece consists of underground metal royalty. On drums is the wickedly talented Ben Koller of another Salem band, Converge (if any non aggro-rock music listener is up to the task, take a listen to Converge’s landmark 2001 release Jane Doe. Meshuggah nor Dillinger Escape Plan could not prepare me for that record). On bass, Jeff Matz of High on Fire who are perhaps stoner metal’s greatest success story (sorry, Queens of the Stone Age fans). Finally, on twisted guitar and vocals, Stephen Brodsky, one of alt-metal’s notable names, is a member of yet another Massachusetts band, Cave In and Old Man Gloom.
It’s weird but fitting that the spirit of the Bay State, my family’s home state, ran through the show. Songs about witches and monsters played by musicians from the land of academia, chowder, and gross baseball hotdogs, and members with relationships to other Massachusetts musicians; Brodksy’s membership in Old Man Gloom is adjacent to fellow guitarist Aaron Turner, the founder of the band ISIS and Hydra Head Records, with whom I share a first name (as well as with ISIS’s drummer, Aaron Harris, who is the best case scenario for Nick Mason), and was born in my parents’ childhood hometown of Springfield.
Mutoid Man ripped through a pounding set highlighted by the tight musicianship and Brodsky’s extraverted stage persona that connected closely with the audience. He should be a second example, next to Tom Araya, as evidence that metal musicians are not always as misanthropic as their music suggests. Rather, what March 1 suggested, nay confirmed, was simply an exhilarating time, the only thing I or anyone else should ask out of a metal show.
Other shows at the Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell Avenue, Hamden (www.spaceballroom.com) to look out for are: