Words and photos by Marv Watson.

Despite fluctuating sound-quality levels, the crowd were left crowing for more come the end of a successful night of heavy rock in Hollywood’s famous Palladium Theater. Bullet For My Valentine were the main act of the evening, following local up-and-comers Drive A, Black Tide and Escape The Fate, the latter of whose lead singer acted out pretty much every rock cliché in the book, to the point that one expected midgets to turn up dancing round a miniature version of Stonehenge. Alas, that didn’t happen. After the memory of the pelvic thrustshad vanished, Bullet took to the stage in front of a hefty crowd of sweaty teenagers and vrock-scene veterans.

Throughout the set, they pummeled the audience with heavy, thumping guitar riffs and loud, screeching vocals, and the crowd lapped it up. They responded as only a rock audience can; crowd-surfing aplenty and a huge circle-of-death, replete with couples making out in the center.

As mentioned, the sound quality during the night ebbed and flowed, to put it kindly, and Matt Tuck did little to help; they were either drowned out, and sounded good, or they stood aloft, towering over the music, and sounded dreadful. Still, the paying audience didn’t seem to mind. They kept throwing themselves onto the shoulders of their peers, slithering onto the security guards over the barrier, and occasionally making a dash to the stage to approach their heroes. Whether or not they merely wanted to tell Tuck that he can’t sing, we’ll leave that to your imagination, and leave you to enjoy the photos…..