Wow, sounds like you had an awesome time perversionsatisfied. That's kind of what the Mansfield show felt like for me, but I wasn't as close to the stage. Must have been amazing!
I'm gonna paste in the text of that Buffalo News review because I think it's pretty great, and just in case the link stops working when they archive the article I still think people should be able to read it!
Review: Revolver is 1995 redux
A blast from the past
BY JEFF MIERSNews Pop Music Critic
Updated: 08/17/07 8:54 AM
So here was the best of 1995, writ large. Remember back then? Recycled Black Sabbath riffs, run through a punk rock filter, were going to save us all from the cesspool that the pop version of alternative had become, and at the same time wipe out the nagging gnat in the face that was hair-metal. Then all these white guys started supposing they could rap, and the metal-heads got into bed with that, fusing their lousy version of metal with rap. Rock, with a few very alarming exceptions, has been stuck in this rut ever since.
Alice in Chains was clearly the best metal band to have come down the pike for years when it first arrived.
“Dirt” should be on everyone’s list as one of the strongest, most intelligent, and lasting bits of heavy rock to have come out of all this Seattle stuff.
Jerry Cantrell was such a great guitarist, and a subtle one – a guy who seemed more content to make a melodic statement than to shred, a la the guitar gods of the age. And the man could write a song, not just a riff with ephemera of melody attached to it. Alice was the real deal.
Layne Staley OD’d, so we thought Alice was dead.
On Thursday, the band was resurrected, after a long interval, which we can now interpret as a proper period of mourning for Cantrell and his bandmates.
With new lead singer William Duvall, the band — still with its original members in Cantrell, bassist Mike Inez and drummer Sean Kinney — delivered a set that was both stunning in its to summon, and hold there in the air before us, the best of what that whole thing was, and in its ability to suggest that this band just might have a future. Duvall was pretty great. He sounded enough like Staley to make it real, and enough like his own man to hint at a future for this truly great band.
It sure did seem like an abbreviated set from the band, based on research I’ve done into other gigs on this still young tour with Velvet Revolver.
That said — even minus the encore the band clearly had coming to it — there were some serious moments in the band’s set. The most indelible came when the band ended its set with “Rooster,” during which it flashed behind it images of the Vietnam war and interposed them with images of George Bush, all of it sending up sending a visceral antiwar message. You all might rightly wonder what business some heavy metal band has dissing the president guy.
“Rain When I Die” was the moment, though, when it all became a big, beautiful blur, and the listener realized that this music was meant to survive well behind its perceived shelf life. This was just so immensely butt-kicking that you’d have to be dead to deny its power.
Velvet Revolver was the headliner, but shouldn’t have been. The group — Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots, grouped with Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum of Guns N’ Roses — just doesn’t seem like a cohesive outfit. It’s not that the songs on the band’s two albums are weak — a few of the ones on the new “Libertad” are actually great — it’s just that they lack the cohesive energy of a group of musicians truly working together toward a common goal.
all dreams have died
along the way
i coughed up the price
i bought a cage