Review & Photography by Nathan Vestal for MPM
There are shows you attend, and then there are shows that leave a residue on you. Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. Physically. April 2, 2026, at Chicago’s Concord Music Hall was the latter kind. You didn’t just walk out remembering it. You wore it home.
The bill read like a dare: King Parrot, Soulfly, and GWAR. Three bands, each operating in a different dialect of heavy, all converging into something that felt less like a concert and more like a pressure test for the human nervous system.
King Parrot: Frenzy Set to Music
King Parrot didn’t so much open the night as detonate it.
Their sound is a kind of organized panic, riffs snapping like live wires, tempos lurching forward with zero interest in your comfort. Frontman Matt Young paced and twitched like he’d been plugged into the wrong voltage, barking lyrics with a grin that suggested he knew exactly how unhinged this all looked.
There’s a grimy humor baked into their set, the kind that shows up in song titles and then dissolves into sheer abrasion once the music kicks in. The crowd caught on quickly. What started as cautious head-nodding turned into a full-body commitment. Limbs collided, beers sloshed, and the pit took shape like a storm cell forming out of nowhere.
They didn’t overstay. They didn’t need to. King Parrot’s job was to destabilize the room, and by the time they walked off, the floor felt like it had shifted a few inches off its axis.
Soulfly: The Weight of Rhythm
Where King Parrot thrived on volatility, Soulfly arrived with something denser, more deliberate. The kind of heaviness that doesn’t rush you. It sinks in.
Max Cavalera stood at the center of it all, less a frontman and more a conduit. His presence is steady, almost immovable, and the band follows that lead. The riffs don’t sprint. They march. They repeat until they become something you feel as much as hear.
“Back to the Primitive” landed like a command rather than a song. The crowd responded instinctively, locking into the groove, bodies moving in a shared rhythm that felt closer to ritual than recreation. There’s a tribal undercurrent to Soulfly’s music that doesn’t need explanation. It just works, pulling people into its orbit whether they planned on it or not.
By mid-set, the room had found a new equilibrium. Less chaos, more cohesion. The kind of energy that builds rather than explodes, gathering force in slow, deliberate waves.
GWAR: Theater of Excess
Then everything unraveled again, but this time with a sense that the room had been quietly primed for something far messier than anything that came before.
GWAR doesn’t follow a band like Soulfly. It erases them. Not out of disrespect, but out of sheer sensory overload. The stage transformed into something grotesque and cartoonish, a collision of sci-fi nightmare and juvenile humor turned up to impossible levels.
I could tell that someone forgot to warn the security crew about GWAR when I stepped into the photo pit. Me: full white painter’s suit, cameras wrapped with enough tape and plastic to survive a scuba dive; Them: Confusion first. Then realization – that split-second recalibration when expectation meets reality and realizes it came underdressed.
While Carlos and Josue fumbled with flimsy disposable rain ponchos, Kennan made a choice. He pulled the plastic over his dreads, tied it off, and stripped down to a white t-shirt to leave the rest to fate. A surgical strike of protection. Everything else, collateral. Around him, others in white drifted toward the front like they were answering the same unspoken call. It felt less like a crowd movement and more like initiation.
From the first appearance of Blothar the Berserker, it was clear that subtlety had no place here. Costumes towered, props lurched, and within moments, the first blast hit the crowd. The front rows didn’t retreat. They leaned forward, arms up, as if welcoming it. Within minutes, the barricade line blurred into a shifting mass of color, bodies painted in layers of red, green, and whatever unholy shade GWAR decided to unleash next.
And beneath it all, the band played with surgical precision. That’s the trick. Strip away the gallons of stage blood, the grotesque costumes, the absurd executions, and you’re still left with a band that locks in tight and hits hard. The riffs bite, the drums drive, and Blothar the Berserker conducts the whole thing like a deranged master of ceremonies, equal parts comedian and conqueror.
The spectacle escalated in waves. Characters dragged onstage, dispatched in increasingly ridiculous fashion, only to explode into another shower of color. The crowd didn’t just watch. They participated. There’s a strange democracy to a GWAR show. Everyone gets covered. No one stays clean.
As GWAR began their cover of “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan, a different kind of chorus cut through the chaos as a wave of female voices sang along at full volume, proving a carefully chosen cover can bring bands a resurgence in popularity with a wider fan base.
The set blurred together in the best way. Songs, skits, mock executions, waves of color. It stopped being a sequence and became an environment. You weren’t watching anymore. You were inside it.
By the end, Kennan’s strategy had technically worked. The dreads, preserved under plastic, emerged mostly intact. Everything else was gone. His white t-shirt had transformed into something unrecognizable, a canvas of hazardous waste-splattered chaos. But his face said everything that needed to be said. That wide grin, glowing through the aftermath like a badge of honor.
By the end of the night, Concord Music Hall felt spent. Not emptied, just wrung out.
People filed toward the exits in various states of saturation, comparing stains like souvenirs. There was laughter, a little disbelief, and that familiar post-show ringing that settles in behind the ears as a reminder.
What made the night stick wasn’t just the volume or the spectacle. It was the way each band carved out its own space within the same evening. King Parrot fractured the room. Soulfly grounded it. GWAR obliterated it.
Three approaches to heaviness, stacked back-to-back, each one refusing to soften the edges.
Some shows aim to impress. This one aimed to overwhelm.
It succeeded.
