Photos of Prong by James Tourte
w/ Voïvod and Defcon
When you haven’t seen a band in, say, more than twenty-five years, you bring to the show some grace for the passage of time. It’s natural for things to slow down over the decades—voices deepen, paces soften, solos simplify. Setlists may accommodate changes in ability or capacity, with newer material reflecting the current state of affairs and older material sprinkled in as bursts of energy. You reminisce about how brightly their stars burned at the start of their career and resist holding them to the same sprightly standards.
This may be the general rule, but Tommy Victor gave us an exception on the evening of St. Patrick’s Day at The Golden Record.
It has been nearly 28 years since I have seen Prong. Granted, time may have fuzzed my memories of that night in 1997 at the long-gone Galaxy, with Sister Machine Gun and Hanzel & Gretel on the bill. To make comparisons between Victor then and now would be more educated guess than side-by-side assessment. But his performance in 2024 rivals any current band leader in terms of energy, passion, and talent. He brought a joy and intensity to the stage that you rarely see in performers in any era of their career. The beaming smile while picking out intricate runs warmed the steely cockles of a room full of old school metal fans and inspired some epic coed-geezer mosh pits.
In the leadup to this show, I learned that most of the metal music I grew up with in the ‘90s now falls under the category of “groove metal.” I guess that’s what happens when you look back on a definitive decade in music and try to encapsulate its significance; you don’t always recognize that you’re living in a distinct era while you’re in it. But perspective is everything, and though I always filed them away under industrial metal, Prong is considered a founding member of the groove metal movement. With connections to Danzig, Ministry, and Killing Joke, Victor is a pivotal figure who has influenced the metal genre far and wide. He is now the sole original member of Prong in the lineup, which has shifted continually throughout the band’s on-again-off-again existence.
The current Prong assemblage includes Jason Christopher on bass and Tyler Bogliole on drums, both of whom infused valuable energy into their contributions. Christopher, who also has played with Ministry, squeezed under a suspended amp to mug behind a seemingly-innocent B&D security member. While his bass shredding chops were plenty to watch, he hammed it up with escalating shenanigans, first pelvic-thrusting behind security’s head, then patting security on the head, and later giving security a little shoulder massage as if making patronizing amends for using him as a comedic prop. Meanwhile, Bogliole tore across the drums, shirtless in the background, as a welcome force of momentum doing justice and then some to a catalog of songs that probably predate him. When Prong played the Galaxy in 1997, it was on the heels of Rude Awakening, an album I love dearly, but something of an anomaly in the catalog. It experiments with drum samples and electronic accents, which sound amazing in the recordings and were groundbreaking for metal at that time, but don’t always translate well in a live performance. While it fit in with the accompanying bands on that tour—Sister Machine Gun, Hanzel & Gretel—it left one of the more striking memories of that show: the impression of Tommy Victor and a drum machine. Bogliole’s fire behind the drum kit was an appreciable injection of intricacy to match Victor’s machine-gun staccato riffs. It also left its mark on the setlist, which ignored Rude Awakening entirely—a trade-off I was willing to accept.
Instead, the setlist included a few selections from the most recent 2023 release, State of Emergency. They were just as—if not more—technically complex, heavy, and inventive as anything from the earlier catalog. Tommy tore into the night’s opener, “The Descent,” at a furious pace, with whines in all the right places and enough pace changes to keep things interesting. The crowd reacted appropriately, heeding the call of double-bass drum kicks and frenetic guitar licks to swirl the floor with arms flailing in a grown-up circle pit, oblivious to their age or the looming threat of a Monday morning.
Bridging the gap from now to the beginning, they played two tracks from 1990’s Beg to Differ, with Victor summoning “more cowbell!” in “For Dear Life” and the crowd spitting the lyrics back in the album’s title track. Following these early cuts where Prong leans more thrash and plays with stop/start groove, we were treated to some rare cuts from the archives, including “Disbelief,” from their first EP, Disbelief, released in 1987, as well as a cover of Killing Joke’s “Seeing Red.” Victor introduced the latter, which appears on Prong’s all-covers album, Songs from the Black Hole, with a nod to the late Paul Raven, who played bass with Prong on Cleansing and Rude Awakening and was found dead from a heart attack in 2007 by Ted Parsons, another former Prong bandmate.
We heard the most from 1994’s Cleansing, which comprised about half of the selections, including “Broken Peace,” “Test,” and “Whose Fist Is This Anyway?” In fact, they played the majority of the album, winding up the night with a run of the album’s opening tracks, “Another Worldly Device” and “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck.”
The big closer was the biggest surprise—a cover of Rush’s “Working Man.” Not being a Rush aficionado, I welcomed Victor’s singularly rock & roll moment of the evening without noticing the absence of a guitar solo, though my friends in the know were disappointed at the omission. Personally, I enjoyed seeing Victor try on a different sound. It only served to enhance the difference between the evolution of Victor’s sound compared to so many others in the metal genre. Too often, the pummeling energy and barking vocals melt into melodic guitar and vocals over the course of a metal band’s life cycle. Prong, on the other hand, pulled no punches in reviving old material or in creating new music. If Victor wants to put on his pretty guitar and voice for one song, let him have it. The joy and the fury were there nonetheless, and if he skipped this one solo in someone else’s work, we can still appreciate that he took no shortcuts with his own material.
The Rush cover was an appropriate segue to the main event of the evening: Voïvod. I admit that I’m not familiar enough with Voïvod to provide much insight into their performance, though they were an even bigger draw than Prong for many in attendance. The Canadian band preceded Prong by a few years and were trailblazers with their unique style of prog metal. They, too, lit up the stage with defiant glares and frenzied energy to the delight of many who’d waited even longer to see the band return to St. Louis since their last show, as far as I can tell, at Mississippi Nights in 1993. Of note to this newcomer were the absolutely mesmerizing drummer, Michel “Away” Langevin, pounding the drumkit to drive constant time signature changes, and the powerful vocals of Denis “Snake” Bélanger, alternating between rasp and lecture (both original Voivod members). Also striking was the intensity of Daniel “Chewy” Mongrain and Dominic “Rocky” Laroche, banging away on their guitar and bass, respectively, as well as their impressively maintained headbanger tresses.
For my part, this was Prong’s night to shine. Victor radiated with childish delight I have only seen rivaled by Adrian Belew. He stalked across the stage so everyone could marvel at his outrageous manual dexterity. His snarls melted into giddy grins and his entreaties to the crowd for a circle pit were eagerly obliged. Sure, the jumps weren’t quite as high, but otherwise Prong somehow seems to have gained energy while gaining in years. You might be tempted to cut Victor some slack and lower the bar for the decades he’s been at it, but he is here once again to prove you wrong. | Courtney Dowdall
