POP MUSIC REVIEW : Heavy Metal Weighs In

Today’s hard rock was formed in the crucible of early-’80s punk-rock, whose ideals are obliquely having the impact they never had when the medium was alive and kicking. The metal-alternative hybrids (which are generally punk bands in disguise) are about the hottest things going right now. Check out Nirvana.

Anyway, co-headlining at the Whisky on Wednesday, former hard-core bands Prong and Corrosion of Conformity slammed out “heavy-metal” sets in front of a crowd that would have looked more at home at a Mudhoney show than an Ozzy concert, and it seemed as if the only thing that separated things from punk-rock was the hair.

Corrosion of Conformity, a North Carolina band that used to be famous for blast-furnace intensity and uncompromising politics, came across as a bunch of friendly guys, with sort of a classic Angry Samoans-meets-Metallica sound.

CoC is currently metal’s flavor-of-the-month. The two guitars and the bass usually played in fat unisons, both the curling blues licks and the stop-and-start Metallica-esque stuff; the drummer seemed to solo over every song instead of keeping to the beat. And the singer, rasping Karl Agell, kept his politics at full boil.

Prong, an East Village hard-core institution since the mid-’80s, has an almost Maoist approach to the conventions of thrash. The riffs tended toward precise, almost crystalline distillations of rhythm, the song structures were precise, the lyrics were clear and comprehensible. There was never a melody; rarely a guitar chord that could be identified as anything more than pure crunch; even rarer, a moment of passion. The trio may well be the Bartok of guitar rock, but Wednesday, it was almost too chilly to listen to.