Black Label Society
Alcohol Fuelled Brewtality Live!! +5
Spitfire
Ugh. How to get excited by this• Essentially, what we’ve got in Black Label Society’s Alcohol Fuelled Brewtality Live!! +5 is an exhaustingly long live record as laborious as the band’s two studio records, perhaps more so here given the sorta flat and slightly muddy sound quality, exacerbated by Nick Catanese’s rhythm guitar nearly dropping out of the picture when lead gun Zakk Wylde hits solo time, altogether lending a jammy feel to the proceedings otherwise at odds with Wylde’s claims of the Society’s “hardcore metal.” Right. One of those “for the fans” (and no one else) affairs, Alcohol Fueled Brewtality Live!! also finds Wylde-as-vocalist spewing forth a bevy of profanities during and in between songs, hitting his, um, stride with his concession before “Superterrorizer” that “Limp Bizkit sucks dick,” and predictably, receiving the most feverish applause all night; elsewhere, the non-existent crowd is 13 people tops. So, altogether, Alcohol Fuelled Brewtality Live!! is pretty much an exercise of Wylde’s chops (of which he has many) and his extensive vocabulary of naughty words (ditto), and most obviously, a stop-gap record to help pay off some bar tabs (of which he probably has many). Oh, yeah • the “+5” part. There’s a bonus disc of five mostly acoustic tracks, two of which being covers (Black Sabbath’s “Snowblind” and Neil Young’s “Heart Of Gold” • fine selections both, and rendered admirably dark n’ downered): surprisingly interesting, and far superior to their electric work, but hardly essential nonetheless. I’m paying my tab now.
Spitfire Records, 101 Bay Ave., Hicksville, NY 11801; http://www.zakkwylde.com
