Testament

House of Blues, Anaheim

Opening for Halford, Testament was the third band of what seemed like an all night affair. They had a large group of fans on hand to witness their performance. Loud, very, very metal, and with lots of that particular brand of screaming/singing unique to this genre, Testament tried valiantly to get the crowd into the music. I was surprised to hear from the stage a couple of times during the night that the crowd in O.C. was better than the fans in their previous shows. Go figure. They didn't really ever get the crowd spinning or moshing, or much of anything, try as they might. Not that the crowd wasn't into their music, everybody did seem to be enjoying and having a good time. The one exception would be the poor girls who had been brought along by their metal-head boyfriends, who I'm sure ended up spending the evening bored out of their minds wondering what people see in this music. I have to admit after five hours of it beating mercilessly into my head, I was beginning to think the same thing. I'll admit my tastes in metal are fairly particular, and unfortunately, since I wasn't all that familiar with Testament's recordings, most of their songs sounded the same to me. But it seems as if that is the case with a lot of metal bands, or at least the ones who never really make it. I'll give 'em an A for effort and performance, but man, oh man, do they need to work on writing some different stuff besides trying to play faster than anybody else.

You can find Testament's homepage here.