Wednesday 13 came to Rock City a couple of nights ago, but he didn’t come crashing in like you’d expect. On his ‘Unplugged’ tour, the band are fully acoustic… making for a surreal, yet ridiculously awesome night. StereoBoard.com‘s Alec Chillingworth was there. (Warning: NSFW)
Try to picture Rob Zombie playing 20 songs on a banjo. If that’s a bit of a stretch, try Marilyn Manson crooning The Beautiful People to a backdrop of acoustic guitars and hapless whistling. Whatever way you cut it, it’d be a bit odd, wouldn’t it?
They have their spooky shticks, but strip back the make up, bludgeoning industrial beats and larger-than-life stage shows…well, you can imagine it going down about as well as a pint of piss at a wine tasting session with their fans.
These rules don’t seem to apply to Wednesday 13, though. Why? Well, because he’s a badass, multi-genre, madly talented, bloodsucking, motherfucking outlaw, that’s why.
Clad in black (as per usual) but devoid of his usual vampire get-up, Wednesday takes the stage at a sold out Rock City basement with Roman Surman and Jack Tankersley at his side, armed with nothing but acoustic guitars. And they absolutely kill it, for two and a half hours.
Between songs, questions are plucked from the crowd and genuinely funny stories are told by the Carolina boogeyman. The crowd discovers that ‘we parted ways with our record company’ means ‘we got dropped’, that chickens will eat KFC if given half a chance and that it’s very hard to find your black-haired friend in a Japanese city. The dude is just so genuine, and the fans lap it up.
And then you’ve got the tunes. The man’s been knocking about in the music business for over 20 years, and he knows how to pen a singalong or two. His heavier stuff, like Dead Carolina, is given a completely new direction, while the title track of his latest album – ‘The Dixie Dead’ – sounds like it came straight from the opening credits of a Coen Brothers film. Murderdolls favourites Nowhere and Dead In Hollywood, meanwhile, truly get the party started.
The closing salvo – Rambo, I Love To Say Fuck, Curse Of Me and Bad Things – is quite ridiculous. Who plays for two and a half hours, retains the attention of the audience and saves the hits ‘til last? Wednesday 13, that’s who. To many, he may forever be known as the grumpy goth who loves to say fuck, but his fans know better. Wednesday 13 is in a league of his own.
