By Christopher David<\/p>\n
Storytelling has always been a big part of music heavy\u00a0metal, in particular. One needs look no\u00a0further than Iron Maiden\u2019s epic historical songs or Motorhead\u2019s obsession with war and combat\u00a0to get a sense of the often overlooked narrative element to a lot of rock music. At the top of this\u00a0pile, of course, sits the concept album, which can be a challenging entity. Indeed, most\u00a0performers who go the concept route end up staying there King\u00a0Diamond, for example, has\u00a0built his entire career on one complete story after another, not unlike a Danish, makeup clad\u00a0Stephen King. It\u2019s a considerable undertaking, and often entails not just an album\u2019s worth of\u00a0related songs, but the creation of an atmosphere around them.<\/p>\n
Enter Uncle Acid\u2019s fourth album, The Night Creeper, based loosely on a Jack the Ripper\u00a0style\u00a0serial killer tale, the U.K. quartet\u2019s latest album has all of what we\u2019ve come to expect from the\u00a0band disquieting\u00a0harmonies, crunchy, Sabbathstyle\u00a0riffs, and lyrics dripping with…well, in this\u00a0case, blood.<\/p>\n
On their Chicago tour stop at Metro this past Saturday, the atmosphere was firmly in place.\u00a0Gothic lamp posts flanked the stage in front of a makeshift alley\u2019s brick wall, and fog rolled out\u00a0over the stage as the band entered in near darkness and album opener \u201cWaiting for Blood\u201d set\u00a0the tone for the night. A well balanced\u00a0set drawing from their entire catalog, the focus remained\u00a0largely focused on selections from Creeper, with \u201cInside\u201d and creepily catchy\u00a0single \u201cMelody\u00a0Lane\u201d serving as highlights to a set that was light on frills and heavy on maintaining that\u00a0all-important\u00a0atmosphere. \u201cPoison Apple\u201d and \u201cMind Crawler\u201d from 2013\u2019s Mind Control showed\u00a0up early in the set, and \u201cMurder Nights\u201d helped solidify everyone firmly in the world of the new\u00a0record. While the band isn\u2019t big on \u2018show,\u2019 moving very little on stage in a style not unlike the\u00a0shoegazer school of performance, it makes up for it with a forboding, shadowy presence.\u00a0Horror rock is alive and well, and The Night Creeper should be on everyone\u2019s list of this year\u2019s\u00a0Halloween tunes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Christopher David Storytelling has always been a big part of music heavy\u00a0metal, in particular. One needs look no\u00a0further than Iron Maiden\u2019s epic historical songs or Motorhead\u2019s obsession with war […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music-news","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}