Authors David Leigh Abts & Dan Turk.
Photo Credit : Elizabeth Abts Photography
Did Brown Sabbath happen across this unholy combination of genres by accident or was it calculated? One wonders while watching their performance: Are they geniuses like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, solving near-impossible formulas, or are they more like Ben Affleck in the same movie, shrugging their way into a good thing and then just running with it?
Being a fan of 1980s synth pop groups such as Erasure, Psychic TV and Duran Duran, I have little knowledge of, or interest in, doom metal, or whatever early Black Sabbath would classify as (easy there, genre-Nazis). Of course I attend the show with an open mind, but in my free time I’d probably rather pass a stone than take the gravitas of lines like, “My name is Lucifer, please take my hand,” seriously. But these guys give me a whole new outlook, mainly because people are smiling and dancing, as opposed to shoe-gazing and headbanging. Heavy music *can* be fun!
Brooklyn Bowl is the size of a Zeppelin hanger with the actual bowling lanes off to stage right. Before the show and between sets, blitzed 9-to-5 warriors are slamming 15-pounders down the lanes as if playing voodoo with the pins at the end representing the faces of soul-stealing upper management. The crowd spans the spectrum, from cup-flipping frat guys to metal heads who tricked their ladies into bypassing a romantic Friday night meal for an evening of live entertainment “near” the waterfront. (“It’s a Latino band, I think they play funk or something,”) gals who were dressed to impress with their Macy’s summer skirts but know their hunks better and wore their Sunny’s Surplus Stalingrad mud kickers.
Brown Sabbath begins their set and suddenly rips us out of our daily routines like a first-class Vegas act. After an instrumental version of “Black Sabbath,” Alex Marrero emerges in a Fistful Of Dollars poncho, shades and psych-rock sideburns to perform vocals for “The Wizard” with a stage presence that is a fusion of Ozzy Osbourne, B-Real (of Cypress Hill, don’t worry, I had to look that one up too) and The Dude / El Duderino from The Big Lebowski.
Hands down, Marrero is one of the more entertaining frontmen currently in the scene. Disappearing offstage periodically during instrumental covers such as a spy-movie-sounding rendition of Iron Man, every time he comes back onstage he has a different outfit on. Physically, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who looks less like Ozzy, except for maybe the late Michael Duncan Clarke. But he has a natural magnetic energy on stage and you can clearly see that he and his cohorts are having a ball.
Each member of the group dominates their craft such that I don’t know where to rest my eyes — the baritone sax, trumpet and trombonist stage left, the two percussionists in the center or the guitarists or the bassist stage right. So I look around the crowd some more and hear the chick next to me asking her hubby if the music is getting him as wet as her? He responds with a lovers wink that seemingly says, “Why yes, yes I am.”
I look over at the bowling lanes and no one is rolling anything during this set. One group of three made it through a single frame but stopped when they all got 6’s. Ozzy would be proud.
Check out Brown Sabbath, music and tour information here.
This review is brought to you by the Mother’s Day at the Orphanage Production
Review Edited By Leslie Blodgett
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