Record store day was a fun day, where Birdman and I attended Rock Fantasy, a record shop in Middletown, NY.  After some record hunting, we headed down to the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, NJ for the day’s main event, a killer metal show featuring Ministry and Chelsea Wolf.

When we got to the venue, we caught up with our friend Jason and the first thing we noticed was it was one of the nicer venues we ever been to. After about an hour of hanging and checking out the theater, the show’s opener started up.

The God Bombs

Although not the worst I’ve seen, this was still pretty bad.

God Bomb played a mid 2000’s Hot Topic take on industrial mixed with rap and ended their set with a bizarre sounding cover of The Cure’s “Killing an Arab.”

Chelsea Wolfe

This dark songstress was my main reason for going. While she didn’t play a very long set, the queen Wolfe really stole the show. Her voice, good use of lights, and her atmospheric music gave this set a haunting performance without the use of silly props.

Ministry 

The last time I saw Ministry I was only half impressed. This was because I was glad to finally see them but unimpressed that they played such an awful set list although the few good selections sounded great live.

The set started out pretty bad with them spamming their new album AmeriKKKant’s songs with some gems from Rio Grande Blood here and there. Following this section, frontman Al Jourgensen finally said that it was “time for some old shit.”

This when their set started to really rule.

Ministry went on to play “N.W.O.” and “Just One Fix,” then the two greats from 1989’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, “So What” and “Theives” and ended with “Bad Blood (still no Stigmata…).” Because of this second half, I enjoyed them much more this time around.

After the show and failing to meet Chelsea Wolfe, we headed home after a cool show in a cool new venue.