MUSIC: Kreator kills at the House of Blues

    You know that great opening sequence to “Apocalypse Now,” where there’s a brief moment of serenity, this beautiful vista, which suddenly explodes with fire and napalm as The Doors’ “The End” soundtracks the destruction?
    It was just like that, except with lots of beer, Satanic dudes in bondage masks and some fairly gnarly circle pits.
    “Are you ready for Lucifer?” asked a mammoth Austrian fella with biceps as big as a python after having just swallowed a cat.
    The dude in question, Helmuth, frontman for blackened death metal troupe Belphegor, towered over the stage at the House of
Blues on Thursday, unleashing all kinds of hell on the sizable crowd as the venue became a war zone of flying hair and machine-gun riffs.
     Towards the end of his band’s brief, brutal set, Helmuth strapped on a scary-looking leather mask with long silver spikes jutting out from his forehead as the group tore through the title track to their latest chunk o’ pitch-black blasphemy, “Bondage Goat Zombie,” a tense and turgid ripper leavened with some melodic guitar work.
    Belphegor aside, however, this night was dominated by thrash, that fast and furious strain of heavy metal that first came to real prominence in the early- to mid-‘80s. The music has made a strong comeback in recent years, and this night showcased both scene forebears and a promising newbie, the rapid-fire Warbringer.
    Though they only played an abbreviated set due to the fact that they were utilizing a fill-in drummer, the band still put the crowd through the paces and were rewarded with a throng of sweaty dudes loudly chanting their name.
    As their moniker suggests, their tunes generally revolve around nuclear holocaust, armed conflict and carnage of most every stripe, and they do their best to ape their subject matter sonically.
    When the band blasted out their signature tune, the rampaging “Combat Shock,” it kind of felt like being trapped in a bunker on the frontlines. 
    Later, one of the band’s clear ancestors, Bay Area battering ram Exodus, demonstrated why their legacy is cemented in the annals of the genre.
    Their latest frontman, the super-sized Rob Dukes, is pretty much a Grizzly bear with tattoos.  
    “You want us to play some slow s!@#?” he asked rhetorically at one point. “Good, ‘cause we ain’t got any.”
    True to his words, the band raced through a set of heart-palpitating thrash ranging from old classics forever entwined in the genre’s DNA (“Bonded By Blood,” “Piranha,” “Strike of the Beast”) to  newer numbers (“Deathamphetamine,” “Children of a Worthless God”) where Dukes interlaced a bit of dark melody in with his booming snarl.
    With the crowd literally panting with exhaustion after Exodus’ physical set, German metal forebears Kreator ended the night with a battery of brick-heavy anthems.
    “I heard there are a lot people in Vegas who follow religion,” sneered band frontman Mille Petrozza before launching into a fierce “Enemy of God.”
    Petrozza has long possessed one of the harshest, most inimitable, nails-on-a-chalkboard growls in all of metal, and to hear him unleash it live is a thing of ugly beauty.
    Combined with a fusillade of riffs that flew by like sortie fire, and you got a blueprint of brutality that so many heavy metal heshers have taken their cue from for over two decades now.
    There were plenty of hair-flingin’ highlights, but we have to say, when Kreator dove headfirst into “Pleasure to Kill,” the pleasure was all ours.