O.C. Pop Music Review : Danzig Falters; Type O Gives Infusion of Energy

Glenn Danzig returned to Irvine Meadows on Monday night to rule as the amphitheater’s dark lord of Halloween for the second time.

Danzig and his band, also called Danzig, had a rewarding night of trick-or-treating the first time through: Four live tracks recorded at Irvine on Halloween, 1992, helped propel the subsequent EP, “Thrall-Demonsweatlive,” past the gold sales mark earlier this year, giving the band its biggest success since it came on the hard-rock scene in 1988.

This time, Danzig arrived needing another good turn of fortune, its new, widely publicized album, “Danzig 4,” having fallen like a dropped pumpkin recently after debuting in the Top 30 on the charts.

Danzig, the commander of a sizable but still not massive following, has wondered in print lately why he isn’t a first-magnitude star in the heavy-metal firmament. Playing to some 10,000 believers, he answered his own question with an inconsistent performance that had its persuasive moments but lacked vocal power and the aura of diabolical, titanic potency that he hopes to sell.

Danzig’s singing reconstitutes Jim Morrison’s oft-copied style in much the same way that Dr. Frankenstein’s experimenting reanimated used body parts. It breathes new life into the dead but leaves the revived entity shambling about rather awkwardly, with scars and stitch marks showing.

Danzig’s collection of Morrisonian moans, bellows and bluesy howls often wavered or fell flat under the Black Sabbath-influenced stampede of his three band mates--guitarist John Christ (who played with authority and with a no-noodling sense of economy rare in a featured metal ax-wielder), bassist Eerie Von, and drummer Randy Castillo, a capable new recruit who has replaced original member Chuck Biscuits. There were no indulgent solos to interrupt the flow of the 90-minute show.

Danzig, who writes the band’s material, does a better job stitching together his songs than he did putting them across. The show offered plenty of catchy shout-along choruses in a traditional metal mode, and they came with a good mix of tempos and moods.

There were hard-chugging speed runs that stirred up considerable frenzy in the pit, including the Blue Oyster Cult-ish hit “Mother” and “Twist of Cain.” Among the other strong points were a swaying, darkly romantic ballad, “Going Down to Die,” and such swaggering, blues-tinged fare as “She Rides” and “Dirty Black Summer.”

Danzig’s inflated, cosmic-scale depictions of rebellion, destruction and erotic unions require a stage Prometheus if the writer’s ideas are to be amplified along with his music. Danzig’s cosmology seems to have parallels to the idiosyncratic one envisioned 200 years ago by the poet William Blake in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” wherein the biblical God--or at least the one conceived of by many literal interpreters of the Bible--is seen as a tyrannical old control freak, and Satan gets points for rebelling and stirring up some excitement in an otherwise stillborn universe. Danzig’s version is shallow, however, his lyrics constantly rehashing vague, hand-me-down conceits that he fails to flesh out with imaginative stories or memorable characterizations.

The muscular bandleader’s performance fell far short of Promethean, despite energetic efforts that included lots of the shadowboxing, fist shaking and pose striking typical of old-line heavy-metal front men from the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Between songs, Danzig was barely more talkative than the Frankenstein’s monster played by Boris Karloff. Instead, he chose to commune physically with the moshing masses, many of whom dived forward atop a pack of bodies to touch the star’s hand or shout song lyrics into the microphone he stretched out to them.

It was left to Danzig’s encore guest, Rob Zombie of the band White Zombie, to add a stroke of playfulness and unpredictability. Dressed in a long coat and looking like a seedy embodiment of Jethro Tull’s famous perverted vagrant, Aqualung, Zombie lurched, flopped and stumbled about the stage, then started a shooting war with the audience, using as ammunition a harvest of jack-o’-lanterns he plucked from atop a stack of amplifiers. Danzig, who craves a hit, took a direct one to the legs in a closing cross-fire that completely upstaged anything he had done during the show.

Second-billed Type O Negative is a band to watch as it weaves a stylistic patchwork that puts a fresh shine on that rusty old metal. As the New York City band worked through several long, episodic numbers from its album, “Bloody Kisses,” it alternated between the glowering, minor-key riffing of its acknowledged heroes, Black Sabbath, and richly melodic sequences of poppy, keyboard-festooned progressive and psychedelic rock that called to mind the Moody Blues.

The band’s key asset is the arresting, highly theatrical deep baritone voice of bassist Peter Steele, whose impact and clarity were far beyond Brad Roberts’ similar bass-range vocals featured in Crash Test Dummies.

When he moved to the top of his range, the tall, thin, sallow-looking singer came across with rising urgency. In slower passages (and the band favors slow tempos), Steele sometimes sounded as if he were on the verge of breaking into an impassioned “Nights in White Satin.”

A slowed-down cover of the hard-riffing Black Sabbath oldie “Paranoid” brought out new dimensions of anguish and humanity in that well-traveled song. Leading into the Sabs number was a cover of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” that was at least as sincere as it was tweaking.

While leading with a fairly straightforward sensibility that overlays today’s commonplace baleful pessimism with dark romanticism, Steele and company also showed a sense of tongue-in-cheek humor, especially in the made-for-Halloween ditty “Black No. 1.”

Steele intoned between-songs commentary in a voice that combined the low rumble of the Addams’ Family butler, Lurch, and the droll wit of Alfred Hitchcock. “With a face like mine, every day is Halloween,” he mused.

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Type O Negative’s more important message is that, while all the hard-rock sounds and styles may have become shopworn, new combinations are still possible, and not every young, metal-influenced band need sound alike.

Los Angeles newcomers Engines of Aggression didn’t start hitting on all cylinders until their half an hour was almost up. The band’s sound is pieced together from hip-hop (both in prerecorded beats and sampled bits of dialogue and sound effects), Nine Inch Nails-like industrial rock and melodic hard rock. But what often works well on the album, “Inhuman Nature,” coalesced only fleetingly on stage.