Lord of the Lost

Started: 2026-05-14 16:45:06

Submitted: 2026-05-14 19:02:27

Visibility: World-readable

A metal show in Berkeley

In February I went to see my favorite German metal band, Lord of the Lost, at the UC Theater in Berkeley. I saw them once before in San Francisco, which turned out to be one of the best shows I saw that year.

This turned out to be the day that the Super Bowl was held in Santa Clara, down the street from my startup's chip bringup lab and across the freeway from the main office. (At Levi's Stadium concerts last summer, while we were working away in the bringup lab, event traffic spilled out from the stadium onto into the nearby office parks. Spots in the office parking lot were going for $50, and cycle rickshaw drivers peddled up and down Patrick Henry Drive offering rides to the stadium.) I checked the road closures to make sure I didn't get too close to the stadium; and I drove one station further north, to Warm Springs/South Fremont, to avoid game-involved congestion at Milpitas BART station.

The streets in Downtown Berkeley were practically deserted when I arrived to eat ahead of the show, but any bar or restaurant with a TV looked like packed to watch the game.

Wednesday 13 at the UC Theatre

The first set was a metal band named Wednesday 13. Ahead of me in the audience I saw a kid, maybe 6 years old, wearing giant over-the-head ear protection, sitting on their parent's shoulders throwing devil horns. The kid stayed in the show until half-way through the second set. I was impressed, since I can't reliably get my kids to come to shows with me (though my favorite local venue, Catalyst, is 16-and-up).

The Birthday Massacre at the UC Theatre

The second set, co-headlining the tour, was The Birthday Massacre. I hadn't heard of them before, but I sampled their music before the show and immediately knew that I liked their music. It was just about the archetypal ideal of my favorite music in the intersection of rock/metal/industrial, guitar-driven but backed by synths, driven by melody with a strong beat, with a traditional verse/chorus/bridge song structure.

Partway through the set I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a disturbance off to my right in the crowd in the first tier in front of the stage. At first I thought a mosh pit had broken out; but it also looked like the crowd wass restraining one or two people and keeping them apart from each other. The song ended and the lead singer looked into the audience and asks, concerned, “Is everything alright friends? We’re all friends here?” The crowd jostled a bit and one of the belligerents seemed to be hiding but security spotted him and a line of five or six security people make their way through the crowd and escorted him out. The lead singer said “I legit still don’t know what happened” and the set resumed.

But in the confusion the singer lost her wireless monitor earpieces (they had fallen out of her ears and were hanging down her back out of reach) and she spent the bridges of the next two songs writhing awkwardly around trying to reach them, while still holding her cordless mic, and eventually succeeds.

A few songs later a guy who had, earlier in the show, been standing somewhere in front of me pushes back through the crowd to take his place and then starts to dance, drunkenly, bumping into the people around him. The crowd begins to notice and inches away from him. Almost as soon as I notice the problem and wonder what if anything could be done about it, security comes through the crowd again to escort him off too.

Lord of the Lost at the UC Theatre

After that extra excitement, co-headliner Lord of the Lost was almost tame; or at least as tame as one could expect from a gothic metal band.

Lord of the Lost on stage at the UC Theatre

I enjoyed the set, though it seemed slightly more subdued than I remember from their earlier show. Overall it was a fun night out, and I got more out of it than I would have watching the Super Bowl.