Venerable heavy metal bard Rob Zombie once told me that if music critics — or, better still, fans — really hate you, then you must be on to something, so stick to it. That wonky reasoning is apparently the MO of the band-of-the-week from L.A., Bad Acid Trip, which was booed off stage more than once on tour with Slayer last year. That BAT front man Dirk Rogers is an in-demand Hollywood special effects makeup artist and that their CD Lynch the Weirdo opens with a female orgasm tells you most of what you need to know about the band’s, um, musical intent. How about the rest? Well, BAT leaps through frenetic and cartoonish mid-song tempo changes, hitting on pretty much every metal genre imaginable — but way more Mushroomhead and Type O Negative than metal lite — while Rogers rips out his lungs spewing surprisingly serious lyrics that are much more radical than you might expect. In “Kill or Be Killed,” Rogers has this to scream: “Forced into battle by the government / Sent out to kill without any consent.” Whoa, Dirk, tell us how you really feel.
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2004.