POP MUSIC REVIEW : Fun With Death Metal at Palace

You wouldn’t expect a bill featuring bands named Overkill and Violence to be a festival of peace, love and understanding, and indeed, at the Palace on Monday it wasn’t. Anarchy never feels quite so close as it does at a good death-metal show, rock ‘n’ roll quite so dangerous, crowds quite so enlivened by the ugly energy that can make the music so exhilarating. For death-metal fans, it’s Altamont 365 days a year.

Violence might be the 563rd band to be influenced by Slayer, Venom and early Metallica, but the San Francisco quintet has an eerily powerful sound, coming down hard on the minor third: full, sinister and loud, not a melody in the set. The lyrics, as you might expect, cover the gamut of human experience from murder to torture killings. “You’re having some fun?” asks singer Sean Killian. “So let’s continue to have fun. This song is called ‘Serial Killers,’ ” and Killian writhes and glowers well enough to play the psycho-killer in any Roger Corman flick.

The curtain was dropped before Violence had a chance to play its last song, cutting off the set. The crowd roared in dumb rage, tore down the huge curtain and chanted “Violence, Violence” for 10 minutes until they got bored.

New York-based Overkill is one of the old-fashioned death-metal groups--singer Bobby (Blitz) Ellsworth kept going “Waaaaahhhh” high enough and loud enough to bother dogs in three counties--and their slick, professional set was good-time death-metal, just intense enough to leave the slamming crowd exhausted, just restrained enough to keep them from killing their parents.