Walking into West Chester’s The Note, you can feel the close confines of the place pushing in on you. This is however, not an unpleasant sensation. Before the bands even took the stage you could feel the energy radiating throughout the room.
The concert kicked off to a lukewarm start with the somewhat unintelligable vocal stylings of the one man band simply known as Wino. To his credit, the somewhat careworn looking man put every ounce of his heart into every song. Mediocre is the one word I would use to sum up his performance.
Next up was Maylene and the Sons of Disaster. I knew very little about this band before the start of their set, but by the end of their first song I absolutely had to learn more. Awesome is a word that doesn’t even begin to describe these guys on stage. The small, cramped stage of The Note was barely able to contain the explosive energy these guys bring with them. With a set list that included a mix of older songs and tracks from their upcoming album this set was a definite winner. The high point of their set was when frontman Dallas Taylor jumped off stage and started roaming through the crowd high-fiving and mixing it up with the fans. If you ever have the chance to see Maylene in concert, run don’t walk.
Last and certainly anything but least was the headliners of the show. That’s right, your favorite and mine. The one, the only, the unstoppable, Clutch! Words can not describe the energy building up in The Note from the very second Maylene left the stage. Only seconds passed before a general chant of Clutch! Clutch! Clutch! started up and didn’t stop until Neil finally walked out on stage. If the energy was explosive until that point, then after that it was positively nuclear. Opening with “The Mob Goes Wild” was an stroke of sheer genius in my humble opinion. From the second the first note was struck the crowd when completely insane and didn’t stop moshing and singing along until the very end. The set list was a mix of the very old and the very new and everything in between. This band brings everything they have with them to the stage and they leave it all out there on stage by the end of the night. If you see one band this or any year, you could not choose a better band than Clutch. You will never walk away unhappy from a night out with these Germantown, MD boys.
