Decimation and Desecration: CROWBAR AND FRIENDS IN AUSTIN

Gojira once wrote a song about the heaviest matter in the universe. I like to believe they were writing about Louisiana kings of the riff, Crowbar. Having been given the wonderful opportunity to witness the weight of Kirk Windstein’s crushing riffs, I can officially say that yes, indeed, Crowbar is the heaviest band on the planet; and not just because their target audience is beer guzzling body builders. Sharing a co-headlining tour with fellow New Orleans sludge band, Eyehategod, and a couple of well-experienced opening acts, Crowbar and friends put on a hell of a show.

Grey Feather was the first band that played. A mash up of Mastodon-inspired madness and deeply-Texan heart, Grey Feather’s music is powerful, emotional, and heavy. I mean properly heavy. The band’s tracks dipped and changed with an intensity that I came to respect. The music dipped between fast-beating, high-speed violence to a sort of doom-tinged crashing that felt like you were staring at a tsunami about to wipe you out. It was powerful, moving, and felt brutally inevitable. Look them up as soon as possible.

My homies, the San Antonio-based heroes of the death metal scene, the champions of aggression across central Texas, Cerebral Desecration smashed some skulls and burned some bodies. Playing old school death metal for the modern palette, Cerebral Desecration has been desecrating venues for a while now. They’ve opened for such big names as Cattle Decapitation and Brujeria, their members have gone and infiltrated other local legendary groups (Nevallum, Black Jackal, Scars of the Flesh) and now they were bruising bodies and sending moshers to the “empty black”. The crowd was awake and going rowdy, and I couldn’t stop smiling. Insane set.

Crowbar broke the stage and brought the roof down. Despite some technical difficulties, the band sounded absolutely perfect. Opening with Conquering, the amount of crowd surfers, push pitters, and general head bangers made the room look like a boiling ocean of thrashing limbs and swinging heads. Despite his health issues, Kirk sounded blissful, nailing the whole set. At one point a young stage diver kicked Windstein’s microphone stand as he flung himself off of the stage back into that bubbling storm-water of a crowd. “We’re all here to have a good time,” he said in response, “but I’m sixty years old! I have sciatica, and herniated disks, and I don’t need to get kicked while I’m up here. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still beat the shit out of you with my guitar!” Despite the health concerns, the forty long years on the road, and the technical hiccups, Windstein’s still kicking harder than most these days, and he has the humor to match it. The band closed out with a back-to-back run of “Broken Glass” and “All I Had (I Gave)”, which was the perfect ending to the set. Personally, I’d give an organ to see them play “Repulsive In Its Splendid Beauty”, but as Windstein told an audience member who kept calling requests, “we have twelve albums and one hundred twenty-six songs. It’s a lot to keep track of.” Fair enough, good sir.

Finally, the second half of the co-headlining dynamic played their set. Crowbar is hard to follow. The energy, weighted riffs, and crowd-pleasing cathartic destruction that they bring is one of the hardest acts to have to follow up on, so much so, even, that upon my original assessment of the lineup, I was of the opinion that they should play last. I was wrong. Eyehategod is grimy, rodent-like, diseased music. Eyehategod isn’t a band that destroys a place, it’s what grows in the ruins of that destruction. Lyrics about drug addiction, incest, murder, the hellish landscape of Southern America, I mean the group that compared New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina to the battlefields of the Vietnam War is the kind of rancid redneck filth that you’d want to piss all over the rubble of the venue. They don’t call themselves the “Southern Nihilism Front” for nothing, after all. The rot that they brought had drunken, bruised moshers clawing at the air for more. It was rabid, electric, the corpse of the decimated room still had a pulse, and that pulse was vicious. The frontman of the New Orleans legendary sludge act, Michael IX Williams has been a lyricist and poet I’ve kept an eye on for a while. I didn’t want to leave this article before acknowledging how cool this was for me, personally. To be able to witness one of my favorite all time poets and lyricists perform his words live as the band destroys the world around them was such an
incredible experience. I finally got my hands on his rare and highly sought after poetry collection, “Cancer As A Social Activity” and it hasn’t left my side since I left the venue. A master of words, and one of my favorite students of Bukowski, Williams and his co-performers were all wonderful.

All in all, the Crowbar/Eyehategod co-headlining Summer tour seemed to have been a
wild success for both bands involved – and the local bands who opened each city. Especially for
the ever-rowdy, seldom well-behaved city of Austin, Texas. The tour is officially over now, and
no current announcements for a 2025 tour of any kind have been announced yet, but I’d keep
your eyes peeled if I were you. These bands have been rocking hard for forty years, and they’re
not stopping any time soon.

PHOTO CREDIT: Live photos by Liam Tennant for ZRockR Magazine – (c) 2025 – All Rights Reserved.