DETHKLOK’S BRENDON SMALL DEBUTS GALAKTIKON AT WESFEST 8
Photo Credit, Dirt Junior
Brendon Small of Dethklok/ Metalocalypse fame debuted his solo project Galaktikon live at the Roxy Theater this past weekend. Small had ten musicians up on stage with him including two members of Dethklok, Morbid Angel drummer Tim Yeung, multiple guitarists, a keyboard player and four back up vocalists.
According to interviews with Small, he had never intended to play material off the Galaktikon album live when he recorded it, hence the need for so many guitarists and vocalists to cover all the multi-layered complexities and harmonies and guitar-part over-dubs that Small had thrown into the recording of his epic intergalactic solo record. But the band certainly managed to pull it off, and pull it off well. Despite only a few hiccups and what seemed like minor technical difficulties here and there, the show ran pretty smoothly for something that had only really been pulled together in a rehearsal for the first time over the previous three days, and Small’s jokes, fierce onstage facial expressions, and riffing to the audience in between really helped to keep the show flowing!
Small and his entourage performed the whole Galaktikon album from start to finish, which he described as an ‘intergalactic divorce story’ that he wrote because he thought it would be fun to tell a story in nine songs. “Picture Superman and Lois Lane have a really bad divorce and it’s public, and Lex Luthor comes along and says ‘I’m going to have sex with your wife’ and some other people trap them,” Small explained before launching into the epic track “Arena War of the Immortal Masters” near the end of the set.
The crowd wasn’t huge, in fact it even thinned out a little more right before Galaktkon hit the stage at 10:40pm, but those that were there were a core crew of fans who knew every word and looked to be having the best possible time of their lives. But in fact, when the show seemed to be coming to end, and the band had run out of songs to play having just churned out ‘On my Way’, the grand finale on the album, there was yet another surprise in store. After joking around about playing the album all over again, Small told the crowd “We’re going to play a different one, this is from a band called Dethklok, it calls for four part harmonies….since we still have all these guitars on stage.” And they launched right into two brutal Dethklok tracks ‘Thunderhorse’ and ‘Go into the Water’ closing the show in such a way that any Dethklok/ Galaktikon/ Brendon Small fan would have been kicking themselves that they missed this.
While Galaktikon was the headliner and definitely the standout of the night, Wefest featured many other talented musicians. For those that don’t know, Wesfest is an annual festival honoring the memory of Wes Wehmiller, a talented bassplayer who attended Berklee College of Music and unfortunately passed away in 2005 due to a battle with thyroid cancer. The show is a benefit that raises money to fund a bass scholarship. This year’s Wesfest reached its fundraising goal of $25K, and gave away several music-related prizes including a brand new Epiphone Thunderhorse guitar which is still to be released to audience members who had purchased tickets to the fundraising event.
Find out more about WesFest here.
Stay tuned for my interview with Brendon Small coming soon to PPLA!
