MUSIC: Gettin’ Down at the House of Blues

  It was a night dedicated to the raw, spine-shriveling power of THE RIFF.
  Yes, all caps are a bit over-the-top, but so was the single-minded dedication to the most massive sounding of chord progressions on this particular evening.
  It was Wednesday night at the House of Blues, and the stage was manned by one guitar hero after the next.
  I’m not talking about rubber-wristed, Eddie Van Halen shredder-types, but shaggy-haired disciples of perhaps the greatest purveyor of the power chord, Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi.
  It began with the reefer lovin’ redneck stomp of Weedeater, who came with fuzzed out, woolly mammoth jams with a singer/bassist, Dixie Dave Collins, who pistons his legs high up in the air as he plays, looking kind of like an agitated praying mantis. The band took a tire iron to the knees of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Back My Bullets,” beating it — and the crowd — into a welcome kind of stupor.  
  Next up was The Melvins, with singer/guitarist Buzz Osbourne who is one of most formidable modern-day practitioners of the riff.
The band’s catalog used to be full of odd tangents, noise and curious asides — their 1996 disc “Stag” was one of the more unorthodox albums a major label released in the ’90s, right up there with The Boredoms’ “Pop Tatari” — but in recent years, they’ve paired up with brusque rock duo Big Business to bash out more straightforward, guitar driven hard rock with the concussiveness abetted by two drummers. 
  At the House of Blues, the band didn’t pause for one second during their 45-minute set, with Osbourne muscling through ragers like “The Kicking Machine” with funky aplomb.    
  But the show’s headliners, New Orleans’ hard groovin’ Down, boasted perhaps the most impressive array of six-stringers — even their drummer, Jimmy Bower, is a fierce guitarist in his own right as a member of Louisiana sludgecore misanthropes Eyehategod.
Bower keeps the beat in Down, but the guitars are handled with impressive force and finesse by the tandem of Kirk Windstein and Pepper Keenan, who also spend time in Crowbar and C.O.C. respectively.
  Together, they summon a thick, hair flingin’ wall of sound buffered with a Southern swing that somehow makes the band’s stoner-friendly rock ’n’ roll both overpowering and light on its feet at times.
  You can swing your fists and your hips to this bunch.
  Their frontman, former Pantera singer Phil Anselmo, helps the cause by blending a soulful howl in with a more biting bark. He’s testosterone incarnate, a flexed-biceps-of-a-dude who puffs his chest out and sings with gale-wind force.
  But he also possess real range and can distill a sad, world-weary kind of melancholia when he wants to, such on the moody, meditative “Nothing in Return (Walk Away).”
  But really, Down’s set was all about overwhelming everything with lots of fretboard firepower on buffets of chuggin’ riffs like “N.O.D.,” “There’s Something On My Side” and “Losing All.” 
  The guitarists tended to grimace as they played, their faces tied up in snarling knots, their visages almost as gnarly as the sound they were chasing.