I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: May 14, 2026] Dethklok

So I was aware of the show Metalocalypse, but didn’t know much about it.  When Dethklok toured last time, I read about how interesting it was to have a cartoon band like Gorillaz (but heavy metal) play live.

I didn’t know much about their music.  I listened to a few songs and was cool with them.  I expected a funny kind of show with the band playing behind or beneath animated versions of themselves.

But instead, what we got was the band in darkness (literally, you couldn’t see their faces at all) and clips from the show on the screen behind them.  So it was kind of the worst of both worlds.  It wasn’t new animation of the band playing these songs, it was just random clips–or maybe clips from the show when they played these songs?  But there were lots of repeated clips, so that wasn’t as much fun.

It also meant that those of us who didn’t know the show really had no idea what was going on.  My son, who didn’t know anything about the show thought they were villains and not the world’s most favorite band

The set opened with a video–Is Dethklok Back?  And it was pretty funny.  So I assumed the whole show would be funny in some way.  But it wasn’t.  It was serious death metal–fast, heavy and completely ununderstandable.  The songs were short and there were definitely songs that people liked more than others, but it was more or less a blur of noise.

Now, I had no idea who was in this band (since they were completely in darkness).  But that seems to have been the point.  But other people who have reviewed the show assure me they are top notch players.

Medium says

Adult Swim’s Dethklok, as featured in Metalocalypse, belong with that top tier, and as a death metal band they deliver the goods. Brendon Small has the songwriting and guitar chops to mark this band clearly in the realm of a serious endeavor, even while their lyrics are rife with irony and leaning hard into the death metal genre. Of course, it helps to have Gene Hoglan behind the drums, arguably one of the best ever drummers in his chosen field of music.

So, yea, I guess the band was great.  But we were watching the videos since we couldn’t actually see the band.

After a few songs there was another comic video Happy Klokaversary.  This one was pretty It was somewhere around here that I said to my son that I got it.  And I didn’t need to see any more.  Now, I, and I stress this, never leave a show early.  I don’t mind waiting in traffic if the encore was worth it.  But I had had enough.  It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, I just didn’t see much else happening.  The diehard fans were enjoying it and slam dancing.  But the rest of us who were thinking of them as a bit of a novelty were drifting away.  It was interesting to me that many many people left after Amon Amarth.  Was this planned by the promoters?  Was Amon Amarth the real headliners but they didn’t want to force people to sit through Dethklok?  That sounds mean, but I’m not the only one who noticed.

ParklifeDC says

The touring band assembled to play the Dethklok music is led by Brendon Small (who created the show and writes the music), backed by a band of accomplished session players whose names you can look up if you care to. The set ran 20 songs. For approximately all of those songs, the band was left unlit on a darkened stage and rendered as silhouettes along the bottom edge of an enormous backdrop, on which the actual show — meaning the Metalocalypse cartoons — played above them.

The crowd thinned visibly toward the end. The energy Amon Amarth had built across 75 minutes of physical, in-the-flesh metalcraft drained out of the room as the cartoons rolled and the silhouettes played on. By “Go Into the Water” the floor had room to move that it hadn’t had since the beer-line shuffle.

My son and I had left long before Go Into the Water

This is the diagnosis: It was not a concert. It was a screening with live musical accompaniment (what is this, Wolf Trap?), the accompaniment provided by some of the best players in the genre, hidden on purpose. People paid concert prices and got a multimedia presentation. The people around me on the way out called it legendary, and I do not doubt them, because for the right kind of fan, with the right kind of memory of the cartoon, this was exactly the experience they came for, and Castle Rat and Amon Amarth were the warm-up acts to the real headliner, which was the fans own nostalgia.

A meaningful share of the room that came for Dethklok left before the final song. Make of that what you will (or just blame traffic).

I looked at setlist and saw that there were a half dozen songs left including some encores.  I did get a kick out of Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle and I was interested in the video clip Concert Tips with Facebones.  But it turned out to be a video of Facebones (I guess a character on the show?) getting stoned.  It was kind of funny, but as it was wrapping up, I nudged my son and he was happy to leave as well.  We both agreed that nothing different was going to happen during the end of the set and we got it.

And heck we beat the traffic too.

∂ The Dethalbum (2007)
≈ Dethalbum II (2009)
≡ Dethalbum III (2012)
Ø The Doomstar Requiem: A Klok Opera Soundtrack (2013)
∇ Dethalbum IV (2023)