Windhand

Last night I saw Windhand – another Sabbath-influenced stoner rock band – play the U Street Music Hall in downtown DC.   This morning I finished off Disc 2 of 2 of Season 3 of 3 of “Rick and Morty”.  Which should I address today?  Well, R&M has Season 4 coming, Rick knows when, whereas last night’s show was the first on the entire tour for Richmond, Virginia based Windhand, so I’d say the concert review is probably more timely.

The U Street Music Hall is fairly new.  It opened in 2010, but this is my first show there.  It’s on U Street, of course, at the corner with Twelfth Street, meaning it’s a block east of the Lincoln Theater, several blocks north of the Black Cat (on Fourteenth Street) and several blocks east of the bottom of Adams Morgan.   I took Uber there and back without a problem.

I got there as the venue opened, and even after purchasing a t-shirt, still got up front to the stage.  Then the opening act, Genocide Pact, started their sad excuse for music – Cookie Monster vocals and tenth rate Metallica riffing – and I immediately sought somewhere else to wait out their set and await Windhand’s arrival.

Note: the stage is about six inches off the ground, so unless you’re front row you’ll see the head and shoulders of the band members and not much more.  This is yet another band who simply get up on stage and play their instruments competently.  I found a stool – one of a mere handful in what was otherwise just a large rectangular room with a stage at one end – conveniently located immediately behind a square pylon, meaning I could hear the band but not see them.  Then again, even had I moved out 3 feet in either direction and stood up facing the stage, again I’d only be seeing a modest portion of the band members on stage, so it was hardly worthwhile – sitting was fine. 

Windhand themselves are not bad.  Four albums:  Windhand, Soma, Grief’s Infernal Flower, and Eternal Return.  They have a live album, Live at Roadburn (2014) which is only on vinyl; I listened to it the night before on headphones to study for the show.  

Setlist:  “Old Evil”, “Diablerie”, “First To Die”, “Forest Clouds”, “Grey Garden”, “Orchard”, “Feather”, “Red Cloud”, and “Cassock”.   Half these songs were from the most recent album.  Maybe I’m getting old and my brain has reached full capacity, but I could only recognize that I’d heard the songs before and no hope of remembering the actual song titles.  They may as well have been Karma To Burn.

Lineup:  Dorthia Cottrell (vocals), Garrett Morris (guitar), Parker Chandler (bass), and Ryan Wolfe (drums).   Yes, the singer is female – she sounds exactly like the singer for Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats (who is male).  No, the guitarist was not on Saturday Night Live and “Two Broke Girls”, even though he shares the exact same name (!) but a substantially lighter complexion.

Nowadays a few stoner rock bands seem to be distancing themselves from slavish Black Sabbath worship and are putting out original material – All Them Witches, Dead Meadow, and Brant Bojrk are the ones who come to mind.  Windhand are not one of them.   If your patience for bands which sound pretty much like Black Sabbath is gone (or never existed in the first place), maybe steer clear of this one.   I did find them enjoyable enough nonetheless.  Your mileage may vary.