Graveyard made their highly anticipated return to the Warfield Theater in San Francisco on March 16, with the ‘Peace Across the Wasteland 2019 Tour’, with support from Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats and Twin Temple.
Approximately at 8 pm, the ‘Satanic Doo Wop’ band Twin Temple hit the stage. Led by the duo of Alexandra and Zachary James, the high priests of Twin Temple. Their backing band consisted of a Saxophone player, Keyboards, Bass, and Drums. While the backing band was playing the intro to the song ‘The Devil (Didn’t Make Me Do It)’, Alexandra walked to the center stage with a skull in the palm of her hand, and had Zachary dabbing Holy Water (or unholy water) on the crowd during the opening ritual in which they chanted “HAIL SATAN” over and over. They went on to play what I believe was their whole album. I need to be honest, going into this I had no idea who Twin Temple was, but I really enjoyed their ‘Satanic Doo Wop’ sound and stage show, and by the reaction from the nearly half-full venue, so did they.
After a 20-minute intermission, the ‘Psycho Rock’ of Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats had their time to ‘blow minds’ to the now nearly full venue and that’s exactly what they did to the crowd. Opening the set with ‘I See Through You, off of their current release ‘Wasteland‘, they wasted no time getting the crowd quite riled up for the next 50 minutes or so with their heavy groove and riff-laden sound that we come to expect with the band. The band was in quite a fine form as they blasted through a set of crowd favorites such as, “Dead Eyes of London”, “I’ll Cut You Down”, and “Crystal Spiders”, just to name a few.
At 10:40 pm, Graveyard hit the stage like a ton of bricks, launching right into ‘Walk On’, off of their 2018 release ‘Peace‘. Playing a wide variety of tasty cuts off of their prior releases had the capacity crown head bobbing and body swaying with their bluesy, psychedelia and heavy rock sound that Graveyard has been accustomed to playing.
Guitarist and vocalist, Joakim Nilsson was in fine form. His voice sounded as good as it had in years on crowd favorites such as, “Hisingen Blues”, “Uncomfortably Numb” (off their brilliant Hisingen Blues album); other favorites included “The Suits, the Law & the Uniform”, “Magnetic Shunk” and the final encore song of “The Siren”.
Overall, it was a great night of great music from 3 great bands. Make sure to check out all 3 bands when they come to your town……………..and don’t forget to tip your bartender.
All photos by Scott Martin
GRAVEYARD
