NU-metal CKY skates past punk image
It would be easy to mistake CKY for just another snotty skate punk band. When the drummer’s brother is professional skateboarder and “Jackass” hero Bam Margera, the punk assumption is inevitable.
That assumption would be dead wrong. At an adolescent-riddled Avalon on Thursday night, the West Chester, Pa.-based foursome of CKY (which stands for Camp Kill Yourself) eschewed punk for throbbing nu-metal.
The crowd, a mixture of young metalheads and skate punks, most dropped off by their parents at the door, lapped up every shredded guitar solo and howling gloom and doom chorus
The band’s appearance didn’t alleviate the punk/metal confusion. Singer/guitarist Deron Miller looked more like a scruffy, slightly disgruntled paperboy than a metal frontman. But looks proved deceiving as the band quickly ripped into the murky sludge of the opening “Escape From Hellview.” Crowd-surfing and moshing commenced as soon as the first chorus hit, reaching a sweaty apex during the punishing riffs of “Flesh Into Gear.” For a band associated with the inane antics of MTV’s “Jackass,” CKY’s songs revealed a surprising complexity and maturity in their arrangements, exemplified by the winding riffs of “Dressed in Decay.”
But the incessant fart jokes and homophobic one-liners hurled throughout the set could be viewed two ways. Either CKY’s members really are infantile skate punks underneath all that gloomy metal yelping or they simply understand their pubescent demographic extremely well.
As if to punctuate its members’ yearning for a bad-boy reputation, CKY tore into a hardcore-laced cover of GG Allin’s revolting shock rock classic “Bite It You Scum.” To reach Allin’s level of extreme stage antics, however, the band will have to do a lot more than tell fart jokes and swig from a bottle of Jack Daniels.
As the set wore on, CKY’s songs began to run into one another. CKY may not be just another snotty skate punk band, but nothing it did at Avalon indicated it was not just another snotty nu-metal band.
North Carolina-based trio ASG opened the show with a short set of generic and harmless alt-metal. It was followed by Puny Human, a band of hugely entertaining ’70s riff rock throwbacks.
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