The Black Dahlia Murder at Opera House – April 8, 2014

Photographs by Dale Benvenuto

The Black Dahlia Murder have surprisingly been around for a while. It seems like yesterday that I had Miasma on repeat for days on end, and that album is nearly a decade old now. Within a genre where bands come and go quickly, The Black Dahlia Murder, despite having had a number of lineup changes, have never lost their grasp at being a significant band in the community. Having just released their latest album Everblack last year, the band, lead by Trevor Strnad, are not a set of strangers to the audience when it comes to them being the entity of the band, no matter what line up came up with what material, as the crowd went crazy before the band even began to play. They opened for Carcass at The Opera House in Toronto.

With an overall good show, the one complaint I have is that the sound wasn’t mixed too well. Strnad’s low growls could be heard, but his high screams would get lost amongst the guitars. The guitars and bass lines would often bleed into one another, and although each song could still be heard easily, such a melodically driven band deserved a better mixing of sound (not that any musician deserves a badly mixed set, mind you).

Having gotten that sore point out of the way, the rest of the show was a large amount of fun. They played a great set list full of songs from every era of theirs, including fan favorites like Statutory Ape and What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse. With Brian Eschbach and Ryan Knight’s whirlwind of guitars coasting on each side of the stage and Max Lavelle’s bass teaming up with Alan Cassidy’s drumming taking command of the centre, the band were in control of each song and had a strong stage presence, even with the audio difficulties. It was excruciatingly difficult to not join in with their head banging, and it isn’t hard to see why they were so into their own music (they are a beloved band with an adored discography in the metal scene for a reason). With songs that opened themselves up to me from their newer catalogue (like Moonlight Equilibrium from 2011’s Ritual, of which I haven’t been too familiar with) and the nostalgia brought on from their older material, it was easy to forgive a few technical issues when a band put so much thought behind their material and how they presented it.

It’s now time to discuss the highlight of the show at the end of this review: Trevor Strnad. If any man in metal is a living contradiction in the best sense of the word possible, it’s Trevor Strnad. He sings so angrily but with the widest smile on his face. He prances around the stage like the Easter Bunny tossing eggs out of a basket. He points at the crowd not like a singer but like a buddy who had just found his friend. Midway during the set, Strnad even proceeded to take off his shirt, exposing his stomach with the words “heart burn” tattooed across his navel area to us. Every single second of this madness was absolutely glorious. If no one has called Trevor Strnad the Jack Black of extreme metal by now, I will take the honour of being the first to call him so, as he is an absolute riot. The sound could have not been coming out at all and I’d still have had a blast with Strnad on stage. He insisted that we wished his girlfriend a loud “happy birthday” as it would “embarrass” her, making all of his onstage antics all the more funnier in comparison (if wishing happy birthday is embarrassing to this man but leaping around like the Cat in the Hat isn’t, then I have no idea what else can be considered awkward). Strnad is an incredible frontman with the chops needed to pull off the songs (which sadly couldn’t be heard at its best) and the presence of a cartoon character.

The Black Dahlia Murder proved to be a fun band with the songs we expected and oodles of fun. If they return to Toronto in the near future, despite having grown out of them a bit in my later years of being a music fanatic, I would absolutely go see them live again and hopefully, with everything going according to plan, I can appreciate the absolute madness of a concert of theirs in full affect; If just half the dose already got me going insane, I can’t even imagine what a concert by The Black Dahlia Murder at their best can be like.