Acid Bath/Baroness/The Skull @ Starland Ballroom, Sayreville, NJ 3/7/26

Did a Tee Pee road trip with Kenny yesterday to the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, NJ about 40 away from NYC but still considered "New York Market." I hadn't been there since Motorhead about 20 years ago. It's one of those places where you pretty much have to drive to get there unless you take a train to-what-South Amboy to a car and probably a car to Newark to get back. I've never actually done that. We had to get some records and CDs for The Skull aka Legions Of Doom but after traffic out of the city and Kenny dealing with an AXS lockout at the local Brass Monkey down the road we were alerted mid sandwich that the The Skull were going on in 20 minutes. Getting the merch would have to wait until after the show.

Anyway, we got through the fine comb security that had a next level airport wrinkle. In NYC the standard is phone wallet keys into the bin and walk through the metal detector. Maybe a belt or steel toe will set off the alarm. For some reason they wanted paper out as well to confiscate stickers (!) and a pocket size literary zine Jason at Tee Pee gave me last week that was stuffed in my pocket. "What is this? " the security wearingly asked as she rifled through it.

So going through that procession got up in the room while The Skull had started. For some reason I thought they were now Legions of Doom since the passing of Eric Wagner, but they flip back and forth. This was a one-off fly in situation since that is how the recently constituted Acid Bath does it. They fly in and do one US city on the weekend except this summer they have a European tour opening for System of a Down and Queens of the Stone Age.

Baroness I last saw at a Desertfest a few years back. They are radically different from the band that blew me away way back in early '04 at the Knitting Factory Old Office basement stage (the smallest of three). Acid Bath I wrote about a couple times last year when they played at the Brooklyn Paramount a couple weeks apart. After more time with consistantly playing the come off as a bit more assured but maybe it was because I was watching from a different angle and elevated. Some Phish pheak was talking to me before the set and was telling me he got into them because they sounded like the ultimate combination of Alice In Chains and Slipnot. I got the AIC thing as a reason why they audience has blown up, maybe even wrote about it but I never really thought of it exactly that way. We heard that mid-afternoon there was nobody allowed in the venue including road crew and opening bands and we thought there might be a special guest. Could it be Jerry Cantrell? Or perhaps the running gag of the night...the Boss??? It was none of these, there were no surprise guests. At least none I noticed.

FOR FURTHER REVIEW:

Acid Bath @ Brooklyn Paramount, Brooklyn, NY 7/25/25

Acid Bath @ Brooklyn Paramount, Brooklyn, NY 7/11/25

Legions of Doom @ The Meadows, Brooklyn, NY 9/12/24

Trouble @ Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY 5/22/25