English Dogs were another one of those bands that provided part of the soundtrack to my youth. I stumbled across them at about the time they changed from a punk band to a metal band, but never saw them perform back in the eighties. I don’t think they ever played locally back then. In the present, like a great number of other bands from that era, English Dogs are touring the U.S., adding themselves to the long list of resurrected eighties bands I’ve seen in the last couple of years (Amebix, Deviated Instinct, A.P.P.L.E., Asta Kask, etc.).
We started the evening with a very good meal with my brother at the Thai House in Berkeley, and continued it at Devon’s house, hanging out with his dogs, which given the name of the band we were about to see, seemed like an appropriate thing to do. Eventually, we left the little Oakland dogs behind, and headed for the Metro.
We arrived in the middle of Toxic Holocaust’s set, and while I enjoyed their retro Venom/Slayer sound, their inane lyrics were such that I couldn’t take them seriously. They seemed to get a pretty good audience response though.
The Casualties were up next. I hadn’t heard them before, and found myself pleasantly surprised by their high energy hardcore. The vocalist was more toward the screechy end of the spectrum (think Italian hardcore, ala Negazione or CCM), but this was nicely tempered with the sometimes wordless backing vocals. There was a lot of crowd participation, with random audience members appearing on stage to sing along and/or dive off. The pit was a roiling hive of activity, and everybody seemed to be having a good time. I find that I can relate to this kind of audience so much better than they type of audience we found ourselves in the previous night. Punks show so much less restraint. At Michael Schenker, I could imagine the audience members waking up in the morning to go to their dead-end jobs. At this gig, I had a hard time imagining the audience members being employed at all, at least in any traditional sense of the word. It’s also interesting to note that The Casualties, being the most punk band of the evening, chose to cover a Motorhead song. Of course, it was R.A.M.O.N.E.S., so it was a Motorhead song about punk. They also did the opening bit to Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills. The same night, Motorhead was playing down in the South Bay, so it was nice to get a bit of Motorhead up in Oakland, since we were missing the band’s performance in San Jose. It’s hard to be two places at once.
There was one amusing moment when a guy right in the middle of the pit was calmly texting somebody, and the Casualties’ singer called him on it. By that time, the guy had already walked away though.
English Dogs finished out the evening with an onslaught of old school thrash metal, with guitarist Gizz Butt (last seen playing with Steve Ignorant on the Songs of CRASS tour last year) laying down some nice lead work over the eighties metal riffing and the pounding of double bass drums. They played the entire “Forward Into Battle” album (I think), and followed it up with the “To the Ends of the Earth” mini LP. As an encore, they did one older song, the title of which escapes me. I think the songs sounded better live than they did on vinyl. I’ve always thought the production of their studio releases sounded a little thin, and in fact, at some point I sold my English Dogs records (every so often, I have to make room for new records, and sometimes I need to sell off things to get money for new music – I’m such an addict). It was nice to revisit these songs though, and I’m happy that they sounded so much more powerful live.
Jeanine was of the opinion that the songs all sounded kind of the same, and she liked The Casualties better.
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