Ah, summer’s almost over. With the mercury dipping, the SPOoOOooOooOOOOOoOokiest time of the year fast approaching, flannel shirts and hoodies keeping the chill air at bay, and the killer tours for our kind of music dominating America, now until December, making us gleam. Yes, this is the perfect time of the year for unbridled heavy goodness! One of those gigs is Clutch, a pillar of desert rock, with the swaggering Rival Sons and the acid fuzz of Fu Manchu. So yeah, Clutch made their way to New York for the opening night of their late summer tour. About 2,700 electrified the Brooklyn Paramount to honor twenty years of the Blast Tyrant album. The Brooklyn Paramount is a great venue – and a convenient location for live events. It’s akin to Brooklyn Steel but a lot more spacious.
I arrived at about 5:30 with some time to spare before doors opened at 6:00 for a pre-show meal at a newer restaurant established in 2023, Stack’d Burger. I usually try to eat at a local restaurant, especially if it’s four blocks or closer to the venue. I highly suggest an original stack with an order of the East Coast fries. After dinner, I blazed towards the venue, with my intuition feeling the buzz permeating Downtown Brooklyn as others got to be the first in line to purchase some merch and have some drinks before Fu Manchu cracked the sky with their heavy chugs of lip-smacking doom metal.
Kicking off the big launch of a U.S circuit that’s sure to be a hit for all of the movers, rockers, and shakers was Fu Manchu amplifying the guitar-heavy music that the proto-metal bands like Black Sabbath, Dust, and Pentagram invented at the turn of the seventies. Fu Manchu slotted in perfectly for this killer double bill and completely blew away those who showed up early to see them. I stood directly in the second row and was amazed at their old-school approach of plugging in and going straight for the jugular. Likewise, the entire band was excellent and riled up the audience for forty minutes of glorious, retroactive Sabbath-inspired psychedelic music, an hors d’oeuvres to whet the appetite for blues-based and raw, heavy rock n’ roll of Rival Sons.
Long Beach, California’s Rival Sons made Downtown Brooklyn rumble for an hour and then some, bursting this amazing energy back and forth at crucial velocities with a growing audience throughout the performance. Starting with Mirrors, we became entranced! The bombastic, finer blues sounds of Scott Holiday, the nightingale power of Jay Buchanan, Michael Miley’s Bonham-like drum assault, and the unmistakable boom-boom bass of Dave Best make up the kind of extravagant music that makes you want to dance or fuck or kick some ass! As their set kept everyone feeling invigorated from the likes of the heavy blues rocker of Too Bad, the modern classic of Electric Man, and the brilliant title cut from the Pressure and Time album, Rival Sons is one of the best and most promising bands for the future of rock alongside Dudes, Mother Feather, the Bites, and the Gems. Rival Sons are the real deal. Many faces in the theatre were beaming when they capped off their set with a great extended version of Secret. I would love to see them live as the headliner, but Rival Sons was unbelievable live in preparing a static-filled auditorium for the arrival of Clutch.
At 9:45, the house lights dimmed – out walked one of the musically tightest bands in rock music named Clutch to a thunderous sea of casual fans, and the die-hards as Neil Fallon, Tim Suit, Jean-Paul Gaster, and Dan Maines fired up the twentieth anniversary of 2004’s Blast Tyrant release, a dream record for any Clutch collector to see it performed from top to bottom. Although it felt ethereal to some, it did happen. Clutch pierced the Brooklyn Paramount with Mercury. After opening up with the first of many deep cuts, Clutch took the uninhibited attendees on a 54-minute journey. Clutch played the Regulator, Army of Bono, and Subtle Hustle, as well as Blast Tyrant’s most well-known song, the Mob Goes Wild. Everything was perfect for the first night of a great tour. They continued to groove the audience through the remainder of the set with more gems like Spacegrass, a Shogun Named Marcus. They sent both sides of the Clutch fanbase home smiling with Electric Worry. And that was it. The band became illuminated as they just completed a nearly two-hour set.
Clutch is a band that has earned their rabbet acclaim for not fitting into any genre-specific boxes for the past thirty-plus years. Their sound is an offbeat mixture of blues, punk, hard rock, and spoken word. I can also say this is probably the most unique gig I’ve covered regarding set-list consolidation. If you are seeing a band for the first time, you want to hear the classic cuts, but in a time when many bands perform the same songs year after year, a band becomes too sanitized to keep the casual fans satisfied. Clutch goes in the opposite direction and proves the one fact of Clutch that remains ineffable. The deeper you dig into the deep cuts, the more likely you emerge with a metric fuck-ton of kickass music. Add that to the excitement of some surprise tracks at any given performance, and you have a fun night out from Clutch.
Overall, I thought the show was outstanding. I would compare it second to Municipal Waste in February for one of the best concerts I’ve seen in 2024. The love of music shared between these three bands is simple: they’re the three-headed King Ghidorah of like-minded heavy groovers, showing off the best the ’70s, ’90s, and ’00s had to offer for a triple threat package of great songs, stage presence, big riffs, and much more. See this show, because it will be one of the finest you’ve ever seen. You won’t want to miss this lineup.
Featured Image photo credit Melinda Oswandel.
