The Masquerade in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, played host to the legendary GWAR on Thursday night. Supporting the band’s North American Fall 2025 “Return of Gor Gor Tour” were special guests Helmet, The Dwarves, and Blood Vulture. Established in 1989, The Masquerade is one of Atlanta’s most iconic music venues, known for its grit and industrial character. The venue footprint features four indoor rooms – Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Altar – each offering its own vibe and capacity. Heaven, the largest of the general admission spaces, served as the battleground for the evening’s carnage. Fans of all ages packed the room, many of them decked out in elaborate costumes – or as tradition dictates, white shirts – ready to embrace a night of chaos in true GWAR fashion.
Opening the night at 7:00 p.m. with a sound as shadowy as their name suggests, New York’s Blood Vulture delivered a performance that felt like stepping into a cinematic nightmare. The brainchild of Jordan Olds, the self-described “gothic sludge” project “melds the emotive vocal stylings of grunge’s golden era with the crushing weight of death metal, the bleak romanticism of goth rock, and the slow-burn dread of doom.” Their recently released debut LP, Die Close (June 2025), served as the backbone of the set, and I particularly enjoyed the single “Burn For It.” The brooding Blood Vulture provided that musically fitting opening salvo for what was to come throughout the rest of the night.
Blood Vulture
Jordan Olds – Lead vocals, guitar
Addrian Jafaritabar – Bass
Moe Watson – Drums
James Stivaly – Guitar
Setlist:
1.) An Embrace in the Flood
2.) A Dream About Starving to Death
3.) Burn For It
4.) Die Close: Finale
The Dwarves hit the stage to the track “Dominator” at 7:45 p.m. like a lit fuse, detonating into their set with the kind of reckless enthusiasm only they can deliver in a 58-second song. Frontman Blag Dahlia commanded the room with a mix of swagger, sly humor, and effortless punk-rock charisma, strutting across the stage as if every square inch belonged to him. His vocals were sharp and snarling one moment, then mock-sweet and taunting the next, all the while the band moved at breakneck speed around him, ripping through 16 songs with tight precision wrapped in deliberate chaos. Dahlia clearly fed off the early crowd’s energy, tossing out jokes between songs, engaging fans directly, and treating the entire room like an unruly extended family. Simply put, The Dwarves live were high-octane punk theater not to be missed.
The Dwarves
Blag Dahlia (a.k.a. Julius Seizure, born Paul Cafaro) – Vocals
Ginger Fanculo – Guitar
Nick Oliveri – Bass
Snupac (Gabriel Perez) – Drums
Setlist:
1.) Dominator
2.) Voodoo
3.) Roxette
4.) Devil’s Level
5.) Back Seat of My Car
6.) Let’s Fuck
7.) We are The Scene
8.) Speed Demon
9.) We Only Came to Get High
10.) Pimp
11.) Like You Want
12.) Fuck You Up and Get High
13.) I Will Deny
14.) Everybodies Girl
15.) We Must Have Blood
16.) Unrepentant
From the moment alternative metal band Helmet took command around 8:30 p.m., it was clear that the outfit’s founder, 65-year-old Page Hamilton, was still the engine driving its musical chaos with calculated guitar precision. With his angular riffs cutting through the Atlanta air like a surgical blade, Hamilton owned the stage with a rare combination of intensity and control. His vocals remained equal parts sneer and controlled fury, punctuated only by the jagged, stop-start rhythms that have defined Helmet’s signature sound for decades.
Unconscionably, the last time I caught Helmet live was back in 1992 (in the Old Dominion Ballroom of Squires Student Center at Virginia Tech, when tickets were $2 for students and faculty, and $3 for the public) just prior to the release of their second studio album, Meantime. Ironically for me, Hamilton kicked off Thursday’s set with the tune “Give It” pulled from that release.
Between songs, Hamilton’s measured charisma shone. He isn’t a showman in the traditional sense, but his quiet confidence and occasional sly smile conveyed a sense of shared understanding with his adoring audience. Helmet’s 16-song set was an angry punch to the eardrums, concluding with back-to-back bangers in “Milquetoast” from The Crow (1994) soundtrack and “In the Meantime,” which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1992.
Helmet
Page Hamilton – Lead guitar, lead vocals
Kyle Stevenson – Drums, backing vocals
Dan Beeman – Rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Dave Case – Bass, backing vocals
Setlist:
1.) Give It
2.) Ironhead
3.) Birth Defect
4.) Rude
5.) Wilma’s Rainbow
6.) Dislocated
7.) Repetition
8.) Life of Death
9.) Just Another Victim (Helmet & House of Pain song)
10.) Unsung
11.) Smart
12.) Symptom of the Universe (Black Sabbath cover)
13.) Milquetoast
14.) In the Meantime
From the moment GWAR’s monstrous silhouettes loomed into view as the clock crossed 9:45 p.m., the crowd went from anticipation to full-blown pandemonium. When the first notes of “The Great Circus Train Disaster” dropped, fans surged forward like they were answering a rallying cry, arms raised, voices screaming, and bodies swaying in chaotic communion. This wasn’t just any concert – it was a venue invasion by GWAR.
On stage, the band unleashed their trademark horror-comedy metal spectacle. Campy intergalactic warriors, costumed in latex monstrosities, stalked the platform, wielding chainsaws, squirting geysers of fake blood, and launching cascades of goo toward the front rows. These weren’t random effects; every blast was choreographed with a joke or a flame-throwing skewering of some cinematic or political villain. Shamefully, I hadn’t seen GWAR live in probably 30-plus years, but their enduring theatrics still remain equal parts grotesque satire and full-throttle performance art.
A GWAR audience is more than passive spectators, they are participants in the madness. Fans energetically cheered when “splash zones” formed, where the first few rows were doused with red or blue goop from the stage. Moreover, the mosh pit churned with energy, people crowd-surfed, devotees pumped their fists hard into the air, and the more theatrical stunts (like mock executions or character battles) drew loud roars of approval, none more than the appearance of Gor Gor the dinosaur.
As expected, GWAR’s banter with the crowd was relentless. Between songs, their monstrous frontmen cracked jokes, taunted hecklers, and leaned into absurd character arcs that played out like a twisted sci-fi soap opera. Their sarcasm was razor-sharp but always playful, reminding you this is about performance first and chaos second.
By the end of the night, GWAR closed with a brutal, raucous finale of “Sick of You,” leaving the compacted floor audience both physically exhausted and emotionally wired. When the venue lights finally came up, people looked like they’d survived a glorious war: sticky, exhilarated, and buzzing from a shared grotesque ritual. And extra kudos go out from me to the bachelor party that showed up in all-white suits to get GWAR-gooed while crowd-surfing all night.
GWAR will conclude the current leg of this tour supported by Helmet, The Dwarves, and Blood Vulture on Saturday, November 22nd, at The NorVa in Norfolk, Virginia.
GWAR
Mike Derks (Balsac the Jaws of Death) – Rhythm guitar
Brad Roberts (Jizmak Da Gusha) – Drums
Matt Maguire (Sawborg Destructo) – Co-lead vocals
Bob Gorman (Bonesnapper) – Backing vocals
Michael Bishop (Blöthar the Berserker) – Lead vocals
Casey Orr (Beefcake the Mighty) – Bass, backing vocals
Tommy Meehan (Grodius Maximus) – Lead guitar, backing vocals
Setlist:
1.) The Great Circus Train Disaster
2.) Filthy Flow
3.) Metal Metal Land
4.) Saddam a Go-Go
5.) Crack in the Egg
6.) Bring Back the Bomb
7.) Hail, Genocide!
8.) Fuck This Place
9.) Womb With a View
10.) Lot Lizard
11.) Bad Bad Men
12.) Rock ‘n’ Roll Never Felt So Good
13.) Tyrant King
14.) America Must Be Destroyed
Encore
15.) Mother Fucking Liar
16.) Pussy Planet
17.) Sick of You
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Elliott is a music photographer covering shows in Atlanta, Georgia, and the surrounding area. The highlight of his photography career was back in the early ’90s, when he sold Neil Diamond the rights to his negatives from a show and then purchased a set of tires for his 1979 280ZX during college with the money.