KING DIAMOND at the Sound Academy, Saturday, October 18.
A problem with NOW’s web publishing infrastructure is that it only allows me to give this King Diamond concert a maximum of five Ns, and not the full 666 (trillion) it deserves. At the risk of misusing the word “literally,” and then overusing it, it was literally the most fun I have literally ever had in my literal life, ever, literally. I just put together a playlist of the show’s setlist to help me not forget it. Can you press a Grooveshark playlist to vinyl? And then frame it?
Fun-haters who don’t “get” metal may not understand why watching a nearly 60-year-old man in black and white corpse paint and top hat, singing into a mic stand made of human bones, stalk a two-floor stage decked out with lit up inverted crosses, pentagrams, human puppets and lots of other haunted house bric-a-brac is amazing. To this I say: shut up!
Beyond the band’s more-Maiden-than-Maiden tech-metal thrashing, the over-the-top, absurd, stage theatrics and coy banter (“This is a song off our new album! It’s about….six or seven years old”) made the Toronto stop of King Diamond’s new tour feel like a show. Like a show in some old-timey sense where you put on good clothes and rent a babysitter and go to a place not just to be there but to really take it in. A “show” like in the sense of “dinner and a show,” but dinner is seven Budwesier tall boys and a piece of Excel gum you scored off the Sound Academy men’s washroom attendant.
Diamond and his band played the hits from their own records and King’s earlier releases with Danish black metal pioneers Mercyful Fate. They even performed a medley of their own songs, knowing to trim their own fat. They had actors on stage dressed as witches and ghosts and old grandmothers. For the first encore, they performed a magic trick that saw that old grandmother disappeared by a surgeon and a priest. (Seeing this, I could only smile and throw my hands up like Marge Simpson, amused at license plates indoors at Uncle Moe’s Family Feedbag: “Whatever!”) For the second encore, they performed “The Family Ghost,” easily one of the best songs about a ghost pushing you down a flight of stairs ever recorded.
If there was a best moment in this 90-minute show defined by its best-ness, it was when the lit-up pentagram lowered and was replaced by a huge logo of King Diamond’s own face. Screams. Howls. Horns held high.
Hail Satan? No. Hail King Diamond. He is the one.
