Out on Market St. downtown San Francisco was your average quiet Friday night for the area,

but inside the Warfield was a different story.

The band Down prepared to take the stage for one of its two scheduled CA tour dates promoting their new album

Down III: Over the Under. As the only act for the night, their fans appeared

to need no warming up, nearly starting a mosh pit to the music and videos displayed

prior to the show. The anxiety, tension, and excitement was oozing out and finally

exploded when the band came out firing a hard melodic intro jam.

 Immediately the floor, with all its edginess, turned into a moving creature

of bodies, heads, and arms molding itself to the melody of the music.

Releasing their new album just three days before the show,

the fans couldn’t seem to get enough, and for good reason.

This southern rock sludge group is not your average run of the mill band,

but comprised of members from Pantera, Corrosion of Conformity, Crowbar,

and Eyehategod. Starting out as a side project nearly 16 years ago this

 supergroup has just released their third and most critically acclaimed album

 thus far. The bands first three song demo was given out underground

to fans of their main bands, and eventually spread around the world with such

 popularity it led to their debut album NOLA

(for New Orleans, Louisiana) in 1995 and later to

 Down II: A Bustle in Your Hedgerow in 2001.

The bands front man Phil Anselmo (ex-Pantera vocalist) led the show with chest-pounding, throat-rumbling harmonic tone and was overly grateful to the crowd thanking them over and over and shaking the hands of every crowd surfer the Warfield security helplessly tried to control. Anselmo’s amazing career though has been a roller coaster of a ride he almost didn’t come out of. After dealing with drug and alcohol addiction, the death of his longtime band mate, Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, and the destruction of his hometown, New Orleans, by hurricane Katrina has left Anselmo a changed and sober man. Known for being obviously intoxicated on stage, the Warfield instead saw a sharp, charismatic, and sober Anselmo at one point even reprimanding his band for missing a vocal queue saying, “Way to sing your backups”, over the mic during “I Scream”.

But with band mates like Pepper Keenan (Corrosion of Conformity), Kirk Windstein (Crowbar), Rex Brown (Pantera), and Jimmy Bower (Eyehategod), this southern-metal “sludge doom” supergroup is proving they are here to stay with their best album to date, a focused and sober leader, and an amazing performance at the Warfield. We’ll be awaiting their return.