A busy crowd of leather jackets, leopard print and snaking tattoos streamed into the 9:30 Club on Tuesday night. Valient Thorr was set to revive classic rock for one night only with Eagles of Death Metal and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.
Donning cut-off denim jackets and hair – beards included – that ran well past their shoulders, Valient Thorr savagely took the stage with rare energy for a rock and roll show.
Valient Himself (yes, that is the lead singer’s name), screamed into the microphone to amp the crowd, and they took off, shredding guitars and pounding drums with violence that could call more attention than a gunshot. Never was there a better venue to head-bang.
Piece by piece, Valient tore off layers of clothes, until he was left bare-chested, screaming into the microphone. Then, holding his t-shirt above him during a rare drum roll, he wrung the sweat from the shirt into his salivating mouth. Tossing the shirt, he had more to show. Valient began to climb the speakers, some 20 feet high, reaching the balcony of the club. He straddled the rail and continued to sing, before leaping back to stage.
“You can’t trust Mother Earth, because there aren’t enough cats to save us. Plus, she killed the dinosaurs,” Valient said to the crowd.
What planet are these guys from? Well, as it turns out, not ours. I caught Valient Himself after the show, and this is what he had to say about their origin, “Well, we were born inside Burlatia, which was the only city left when we were there inside the planet Venus … The planet was sort of like this at one point, but this was just like a baby planet, but wars tore that planet apart, wars and terrible pollution… We were scientists, and when we chose to become a band was after we had been to Earth many times, and once we crashed we couldn’t be scientists anymore. We were kind of stuck here. We had to figure out a job.”
Well, as it turns out, their goal has transformed since being here. Now relegated to life on Earth, they have made it their mission to motivate. As Valient said, “The desire to stand out of the sea of crap … I just want people to think about things that they don’t normally think about. Everybody sits on their ass every single day now. War has been turned into entertainment, and nobody really gets anything done. It just becomes a lot of hot air, and I don’t want to be a hot air balloon.”
Understanding this, we can begin to see why he wrings sweat into his mouth. “I just think that sweat is a pure product of efforts realized. I think if you sweat like we sweat every single day, it becomes pure.” And it is with this effort, that Valient Thorr urge us to move from complacency.
Valient Thorr rocked Tuesday night, holding nothing back. Valient begged, “Get in here like you’re on my team, because we got a championship, the championship of rock and roll!” Well, why not?
