Red Lamb Recap

Last night was probably one of the shortest sets we've ever played, but it was a ridiculously fun show.

Reverence of Apostasy kicked off the evening with a short, intense set of metal. If death metal is your cup of tea, then these guys are definitely worth checking out.

We hit the stage for a half hour set. Now, we've been at this for some time through the years, and I can't remember ever playing a half hour set before. We're so used to trying to fill 2 hours that the notion of dropping songs just seems crazy. We managed to drop some stuff on the fly so that there would be sufficient time for Red Lamb to get rolling at 10:30.

Red Lamb were great., That's pretty much an understatement. Dan Spitz has put together a really strong touring lineup for that band, and I hope that a follow-up album to their debut features all of these guys. The Red Lamb material translated really well live, we were all front and center diggin' it. The Anthrax material that they did went over REALLY well. It was interesting to hear it with one guitar, but it really did work. I've always maintained that Danny Spitz has always been underrated as a player, and listening to him play from 5 feet away, I'm going to amend that by saying "tragically underrated". The guy's a monster.

Candy Machine Guns closed the show. At this point, my hearing was pretty well dying, but they sounded good to me. Really high energy modern hard rock/metal with some industrial influences. Lots of cool sound stuff happening with these guys. They're at the Legacy Ballroom next weekend (I think the 30th) so if you missed them this time around, check them out there.

One thing that makes shows like this so cool is when you get levels of camaraderie and mutual respect between nationals, touring acts, and local openers. Everybody at the show was cool and fun to hang out with - no ridiculous egos or anything like that. Our friends and fans were awesome as always. We always appreciate your support, and hope you have as much fun as we do.

On a final note, the whole point in Dan Spitz doing Red Lamb is to raise autism awareness. As I had mentioned in my previous post, he and his wife have idential twin sons with autism. For those who've never dealt with autism in any form, it's hard to really imagine the difficulties involved. One thing that he had mentioned is that the rate of children being born with or developing autism is still increasing. They're saying 1 in 50 at this point (they used to say 1 in 150). That's pretty scary, particularly when looking at what the future holds for people with very profound cases of it. My wife and I have dealt with some neurological issues with our son, (not autism, but that was one thing that the doctors were considering when he was about 2-3 years old). Something we sort of anecdotally noticed was that a huge amount of available data about autism and other neurological/communicative issues came from English universities. The USA needs to step up its game and start seriously funding research the way we fund research for other diseases, because at the rate things are going we're going to have a pretty massive health and human services issue in a couple of decades.