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Live review: Clutch
Ricardo B. Brazziell AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Look, I’m a homer for rock of a certain age coming from Washington, D.C., and her vanilla suburbs in Maryland and Virginia.
Clutch are from around there - Germantown, Maryland, to be exact. And they’re homers, too. The band takes the stage to the sounds of D. C. go-go legend Chuck Brown’s “We Need Some Money,” something pretty much only a band from that area would do. (It’s also a good example of Clutch’s sense of humor, i.e. they’re playing a show because they need money.)
Neil Fallon, still sporting one of the best neck-beards in rock, gestured like a ranting homeless dude when he wasn’t playing second guitar. Opening with “50,000 Unstoppable Watts,” the single from their new album “Strange Cousins From the West,” and alternating between stomping blues-pound (“Electric Worry,” “Motherless Child”) and surreal hard rock (“The Mob Goes Wild,” Immortal”), Clutch delivered such a solid set of meat-and-potatoes thunder that it reminded you how little heavy music there is at ACL.
And I could listen to that guy rant all day. A few choice lines:
“Keep calm and carry on/ reefer madness quiets the falling bomb,” from “Struck Down.”
“Holy Diver, where you at?/ There’s a woman on the hill in a wide brimmed hat With a shotgun, .44,/ And a big blood hound in the back of a jacked up Ford.” from “Cypress”
“I’m gonna build a castle out of Goodyear tires/ Cinderblock and busted doors; that’s where I’ll retire” from “Let a Poor Man Be”
“Who rides the solar cycle with no hands ma?/ Who found the Ark inside Texarkana?” form “Immortal”
May he rant another 19 years.
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