POP MUSIC REVIEW : King Diamond Needs Polishing

If you get your musical education from Geraldo, Wednesday’s Country Club headliner King Diamond is probably what you think heavy metal is all about: fast, grooveless guitars, belching smoke machines, and a middle-aged guy in a cape and bad makeup screeching soprano lyrics about the devil into a microphone designed to look like an inverted cross.

Four eager young metal boys, who look only weeks out of the Guitar Institute of Technology, run through the thesaurus of metal cliches, including the harpsichord tinkles and chromatic organ swells familiar to anybody who’s ever seen a bad horror movie on TV. The effect is loud and dull, like a car-salesman uncle at a Christmas party when he’s had too much to drink.

King’s the only metal guy who admits to being a practicing Satanist; he also plays an awful lot of air guitar for a grown-up.

At the Country Club, a gnarled Mrs. Bates figure or somebody dressed a lot like Lurch would totter on stage every so often and divert King for a while. (King was pretty much the first speed-metal guy with heavy-metal concept albums, though his are just Wes Craven-ish horror stories compared to the moralist parables of Queensryche or King’s X.)

There was no slam pit, none of the stage diving, scarcely any of the fist pumping that usually accompanies speed-metal shows in Reseda, just a bunch of dazed people who looked like they’d rather be home listening to old Black Sabbath records on CD.

King Diamond will also be at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim next Friday.