I only discovered Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats about a year ago, after bringing HeavyMetalBuzz back and launching our show The Smoke Signal. Ravenna, our In-House expert on Doom kept pulling me deeper into the doom, psychedelic and darker side of heavy music, and Uncle Acid quickly became one of the bands that stuck.

Their newest album, Shapes of Midnight, was the record that really hooked me. I knew that material extremely well going into the show, while parts of the older catalog were still something I was discovering through the station. That made this night feel different from a lot of concerts I have seen this year. I have been excited for plenty of shows, but I honestly cannot remember the last time I felt this much anticipation before a band even took the stage.

Then I walked over to the merch table.

Diary of a Madman is my favorite album of all time, and Ozzy Osbourne is my favorite artist. The first shirt that really caught my eye was an Uncle Acid design that unmistakably echoed the visual language of Diary of a Madman: the blue stonework, the horror imagery, the theatrical darkness, all reworked into Uncle Acid’s own world.

I bought it immediately.

Maybe it was just a shirt. But standing there, already more excited than I had been for a show in a long time, it felt like a pretty good sign that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Messa: Atmosphere Over Everything

Messa opened the night, and they made an impression quickly. The Palladium is a fun place to see a show, but the sound in the room is rarely its strongest feature. Even so, Messa managed to bring their dreamy, hypnotic atmosphere right to the front.

That mattered because their music depends so much on mood, space and texture. A bad room can flatten a band like that into sonic mush. Messa pushed through it. Their sound still felt immersive, hazy and strange, and the musicianship carried the set even without much happening visually.

That became one of the themes of the night. Neither Messa nor Uncle Acid relied on much of a stage show. There was no giant production, no elaborate spectacle and not much lighting. Neither band needed it.

There is nothing wrong with a huge production. Bands like Iron Maiden can turn a concert into full-scale theater and still back it up with the music. But nights like this remind you that spectacle is optional when the musicians are strong enough to carry the room by themselves.

Uncle Acid in the Shadows

When Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats finally came on, they did not just live up to what I hoped they would be live. They went beyond it.

The stage was dark, shadowy and difficult to photograph. At first I tried to get pictures and video, but the lighting made that nearly impossible. Eventually I stopped fighting it and put the phone away.

That turned out to be one of the best things about the show.

The darkness fit Uncle Acid perfectly. Their music already has a nightmarish, horror-soaked quality to it, and seeing the band half-hidden in silhouettes made the atmosphere even stronger. Instead of watching effects, props or choreography, you watched musicians play.

And they were more than enough.

The show was harder to document, and that made it easier to experience.

Kevin Starrs Deserves More Attention

One of the biggest things I took away from the night was how underrated Kevin Starrs is as a guitarist.

I knew the songs. I knew the riffs. But I had never really heard his name come up in guitar conversations before discovering Uncle Acid. Live, that almost seems ridiculous.

He plays with passion, personality and a sense of danger. He is entertaining to watch, and his guitar solos were far more impressive than I expected going in. The records are loaded with atmosphere, but live you can really hear how much of that atmosphere is being created by the guitars themselves rather than just fuzz, production and studio mood.

There is detail underneath all that darkness.

The vocals also sounded fantastic. Starrs has that naturally high, eerie voice that is instantly recognizable, but another thing that stood out live was Rachel Burnett. Burnett contributes backing vocals and saxophone on Shapes of Midnight and joins the band live on keyboards and vocals. Her harmonies added another layer to the performance, sometimes giving Starrs’ already unusual voice an almost ghostly, slightly feminine edge that fit Uncle Acid’s music perfectly. Her keys and backing vocals helped make the live arrangements feel fuller, stranger and more atmospheric.

She never felt like a decorative extra standing off to the side. Her contribution was part of the texture of the show, and once I noticed what her voice was adding, it became hard not to hear how much depth it gave the songs.

The Black Sabbath Connection

Watching Uncle Acid live, I kept coming back to early Black Sabbath.

Not because Uncle Acid simply sound like Sabbath, and certainly not because they are copying them. It is more like shared musical DNA. The enormous, ominous riffs have that same primitive weight, and Starrs has something else that immediately recalls Ozzy: a high, unusual voice that you hear once and recognize immediately after.

The thought that kept occurring to me was this: imagine early Black Sabbath had added another guitarist and wandered a little farther into psychedelia and horror. Somewhere down that dark road, you might end up with Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats.

The extra guitar changes the architecture of the sound. One guitar can hold down that massive riff while another adds leads, harmonies and atmosphere over it. They do not sound like Sabbath so much as they sound like descendants who inherited some of the same genes and then mutated them into something distinctly their own.

That may also explain why Uncle Acid connected with me so strongly once I found them. There is something familiar buried underneath all the newness.

What Do You Even Call This Music?

I have never thought “stoner” completely explains Uncle Acid. There is doom in there, absolutely, along with psychedelic rock, heavy rock, pop melody, horror imagery and this strange cinematic darkness hanging over everything.

They look horror-oriented. They sound sinister. At times the music feels genuinely nightmarish. But none of it feels like a gimmick.

It feels like their own world.

And that may be the biggest thing I took away from seeing them live: Uncle Acid do not really sound like anybody else.

From Discovery to Favorite

This is where the show became more than just another good concert for me.

Uncle Acid are a band I discovered because of HeavyMetalBuzz. Our show The Smoke Signal led me into music I had not spent much time with before, and Uncle Acid became one of the bands that pulled me deepest into that world.

I went into the Palladium as a relatively new fan who knew the newest album best. I walked out thinking Uncle Acid may now be my favorite currently active band.

I have also been keeping a running top-ten album list this year, and Shapes of Midnight was already near the top. After this show, I think it just moved into the number-one position.

There are only a few months left in the year.

Somebody is going to have to do something pretty extraordinary to knock it back out.

And maybe the best compliment I can give Uncle Acid is this: I went into the Palladium expecting a great show.

I walked out liking the band even more than I did when I walked in.

That does not happen very often.