Way too frickin' loud
by The Central Scrutinizer on 2/19/20Ace of Spades - SacramentoRating: 1 out of 5The drummer for this band is great, and interestingly enough quoted a lot of Neil Peart routines during the first part of his solo. The rest of the musicians are nothing to write home about. The guitarist has learned the Page routines, but I don't hear anything remarkable or lively in his playing - just going through the motions with lots of grimaces.
But rather than treat the material respectfully - like Zepparella does - they seemed determined to play as loud and sloppy as possible (kind of like the original Led Zeppelin did). From the standpoint of putting on a good rock show, they did well. Musically, though, the beams in the Ace of Spades were groaning from sympathetic vibrations and my ears are still ringing - even with earplugs in - almost 72 hours later.
The volume pulverized a lot of the mistakes and sloppy playing from the band. This is the first tribute band I've seen that actually did not give the real names of the players from the stage; kind of silly, self-indulgent. We all know they're not the real musicians that made up the original LZ; there's no reason to pretend.
I think I'm done with tribute shows in general. I see nothing wrong with doing covers, or even whole albums of a particular band, but this show just turned me off to wasting any more money seeing tribute bands. There are plenty of other great modern rock acts out there, but poorly promoted. It was also way too crowded to enjoy the show; Ace needs to cap tickets at about 100 less than what the stated capacity of the facility is - especially since rock (and country, to be honest) shows tend to attract lots of overweight 50 something suburban bro types that get super drunk and then jump and down and manage to barely avoid crushing the people around them that are there to have a good time but be under control...