A Band of Orcs, WarTroll, Apraxia
- Hectic
- 13 hours ago
- 3 min read
Spats
Berkeley, CA
June 19, 2026
I hadn’t been to Spats, a dive bar near the UC Berkeley campus, in probably 20+ years. With a recent change of management they are now having regular shows though. So when a Friday night Dungeons & Dragons inspired local metal showcase came up, I had to go.
Spats is really 3 separate storefronts on Telegraph avenue, a normal sized space with a bar, a room with 2 pool tables in the middle, and a small live room on the end. The live room is narrow and long, with a cool old brick wall on one side and a disturbing (but probably good for sound absorption) wall covered in socks on the other. Really narrow, it reminded me of an old San Francisco flat (but longer).
Apraxia started off the evening with their signature “Caveman OSDM” and humorous songs about death from flatulence, a C4 chastity belt, and more. I’ve seen these guys several times before and they are always entertaining. No masks or fantasy theme with this trio, 2/3rds of whom are also in Frolic. Just good old school death metal.
Hectic / Bleeding Priest records just released Frolic’s 2nd album Legacies of Cybernetica, so of course we are fans of this group of musicians, Lenny (vocals/guitar in Apraxia but guitar in Frolic), Edgar (drums in Apraxia but vocals/guitar in Frolic), and Andrew (bass in Apraxia and not in Frolic but friend of the band who mastered the new release).
WarTroll was up second, in their amazing evil troll masks. These aren’t the kind of cheap halloween masks you can never see out of, they look pretty convincing (except when the lead troll hits his nose on the mike stand and it flicks back and forth).
I’ve seen them a couple of times before, and always enjoyed their set. Pounding fast metal, except for one slow swashbuckling song where they handed out foam swords for crowd participation. The bass player had a particularly great ugly troll mask which I had not seen before – he was later introduced as a new member. All around, WarTroll put on the most engaging set during this evening of metal.
Headlining the night was A Band of Orcs, whose record release show it was. They were celebrating their new album A.I.rachnocracy, a “concept album about the secret rule of our multiverse by artificially intelligent spiders.”
This was my first time seeing the orcs, and they were pretty good, though they were indeed a band – 5 orcs was unfortunately too many for such a small stage. The singer was shorter than your average orc, and they made it work, likely used to being packed tightly together in the underground tunnels of Mordor. But the small stage unfortunately reduced the fierceness of their metal attack quite a bit, and the crowd thinned out.
That is not to take away from their performance, all around I thought A Band of Orcs was worth seeing. Not just for the spectacle, but the music was good too – I purchased their new CD afterward.
I even met someone who introduced themselves as the wife of one of the orcs, who seemed glad to be there, and not at all dirty or wounded as you’d expect a human captive of the orcs to be. Next time I see the band though, I’d rather it be on a large stage like the DNA Lounge. They need more room to properly make fun of us puny humans.
–Hectic
