Live at the Roxy

One of the world’s most iconic music venues-the Sunset Strip’s Roxy Theatre-hosted a legendary 2024 gig by one of the world’s most iconic metal bands-Cirith Ungol. The one-night-only performance was an album release show for the band’s 2023 Dark Parade LP. It captured the lineup at the height of its considerable powers, performing Dark Parade in its entirely, along with a set of classic songs including “Join the Legion,” “Frost and Fire,” “Black Machine” and “Atom Smasher.” The end result is a stellar live album and DVD, band co-founder and drummer Rob Garven saying, “I think we are playing better now than we did back in the day, circa King of the Dead. Onstage I wear in-ear monitors and have felt tears in my eyes when the music sounds so accurate to what we recorded so many years ago!”

Covetable Live at the Roxy variants include the 20-song digital release; a three-CD set (two CDs and a DVD) with an eight-page booklet; and a two-vinyl, one DVD version in a gatefold format with an insert and poster. Colored vinyl options, including red and white “demon blood splatter” and a virulent green/black vinyl are highly collectible. The DVD of the Roxy concert was directed by David Brodsky and Allison Woest (Whitechapel, King Diamond, Clutch) of My Good Eye visuals, with music production by Night Demon guitarist Armand John Anthony and Cirith Ungol.

Cirith Ungol played the Roxy previously, on another landmark occasion: “On January 19, 1983, with Bitch, Malice and Pandemonium,” recalls Garven. “Metal Blade founder Brian Slagel may have had something to do with the show, as it was four bands from Metal Massacre 1, which was released the previous year.”

There was no choice other than the Roxy for Cirith Ungol to record this momentous live collection. “It’s owned by a Hollywood music legend, Lou Adler, and next door to the famous Rainbow Bar and Grill. It’s a landmark Hollywood club, which includes the Whisky and The Starwood (now gone) so every time we played one of these historic venues, it was a special occasion,” Garven says. “It was great to see many of our friends and fans from all over the world at the show.”

Cirith Ungol are thrilled that another Michael Whelan masterpiece, “Demonslayer” is gracing the Live at the Roxy cover. Each studio album’s cover art is taken from the cover of a DAW Books edition of a book in Michael Moorcock‘s Elric of Melniboné saga; the art is by Michael Whelan. The backstory on the Live at the Roxy art is classic: “Around 1984, Michael was at a fantasy convention in Los Angeles and came up to Ventura for a visit. He brought this illustration ‘Demonslayer’ to my parent’s house, the location of our original band room, and we left it on the staircase, and went out to dinner, not knowing that someday it would grace another one of our album covers!”

The classic Cirith Ungol tracks played at the Roxy meshed perfectly with Dark Parade songs, which drew raves from the packed crowd. In writing Dark Parade‘s songs, vocalist and lyricist Tim Baker recalls, “Like the best horror writers, our main goal has always been to make something totally dark and doomy all the way through — an unrelenting journey into the particular chaos which is Cirith Ungol.” That album garnered press praise, including on that noted Dark Parade‘s “enormous pieces of classic proto-metal, on par with and as vital as their early works.”

Baker’s inimitable, scorched nails-on-chalkboard voice has earmarked all of the band’s albums across the canyons of time, from their audacious 1981 debut Frost and Fire to their triumphant 2020 comeback Forever Black, which followed a 29-year-long recording hiatus. Dark Parade‘s singles, including “Velocity,” offers a metallic soundtrack of societal decay and environmental collapse that foreshadows nothing less than total extinction. Despite the fantasy-inspired art on the band’s albums and their Tolkien-derived name — Cirith Ungol stopped exploring sword and sorcery-related themes in the mid-’80s. Most of the subjects they’ve addressed since then have been far more real and frightening than any ravenous make-believe creatures fighting sword-wielding warriors.

Cirith Ungol‘s Live at the Roxy holds its own against other legendary live records. “The Who made an extremely powerful album with Live at Leeds, and my favorite band of all time, Mountain, had several pretty spectacular live albums. And 1993’s Uriah Heep Live [Edit: 1973, not 1993] is another outstanding live album! It’s hard to capture accurately all the sound and feeling of a live concert. I think these bands achieved that, and I think our Live at the Roxy does also.” Thrilled as they are about the Live at the Roxy double album set and DVD, Cirith Ungol is already looking forward to making a new record., as Garven concludes, “This will make fans happy until our next devastatingly heavy seventh studio LP!”

First L.A. Appearance In 35 Years

Note: This is budget DVD quality, not better Blu-ray quality or excellent 4K UHD quality. What do you think about the lower-priced DVD version of Live at the Roxy?

The cover

The illustrator was used by Michael Whelan for Illustrated Collectors Edition of The Elric Saga #4 – Vanishing Tower (Jun 1981). And The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 7 (Oct 1981) features cover art of Elric by Michael Whelan but contains no Elric-related content, and neither the authors nor editors have any connection to Elric or Michael Moorcock.

Michael Whelan

Michael Moorcock

Controversy: in the credits on Live at the Roxy, there is no mention at all of “Michael Moorcock”, the creator of Elric.

CU1@FB Rob: “Thanks to everyone that came out to the show last night at the Roxy in Hollywood! It was a packed house filled with celebrities and record company executives, and friends from around the world! I think it was possibly our best show ever in the history of the band! Special thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make this happen!“

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Hans Peeters

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1 month ago

I can’t wait for this. Any updates on the release?

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