Satan

Live at The Whisky a Go Go

Hollywood, California

October 25th, 2014

Review and Photos by Travis Baumann

With a name like Satan, you would expect some crazy Black Metal band all done up in corpse paint but it turns out that they are actually a heavy metal band that formed in 1979 out of Newcastle, England.

They were known to be part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement and were apparently inspirational towards what would become speed and thrash metal.

Despite their lengthy career, I just found out about them recently with the release of "Life Sentence". Their style is very much in the vein of Black Sabbath meets Judas Priest which is a good thing. They have a bit of an early stoner-type, doom metal sound but with a cleaner, faster guitar style.

The set opened with an atmospheric build of keyboards and ambiance as the band took the stage. This built into their first song, "Trial By Fire". The crowd was chanting Satan as the lead singer emerged.

I looked around and the audience was almost entirely made up of really young fans but apparently they have a big following of younger blood.

The band is certainly not young but had the energy and mentality that defied age. The singer's voice would range from mid-range to extremely high for punctuation points.

They did a full set of about fifteen songs, I am not entirely familiar with all of them but the ones that really stood out to me included; "Blades of Steel", "Time to Die" and "Siege Mentality".

My favorite songs of theirs of the night were accompanied by a bit of introduction from their front-man. I really enjoyed "The Ritual" as well as "Incantations" and "Testimony".

They finished up the night with "Cenotaph" and "Kiss of Death" both of which got uproarious approval from the crowd. Overall, it was a good show for an old school band making a new name for themselves amongst a much younger heavy metal crowd.

They definitely can hold their own on stage and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I think it must have been pretty controversial for them to choose Satan as the name for their band, especially at the time they came out, but at the same time it is a pretty pretentious thing to call yourself the bringer of all evil.

I do like them but I understand why they released a number of albums under other monikers such as Pariah and Blind Fury.

I recommend checking out their latest endeavor, "Life Sentence" and they released a live album of their North American tour so you can check this experience out at home but it lacks all the cool lighting and in your face energy the band puts out on stage.

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