Live and Raw

Matt Zane has been a busy man. On one hand, the Los Angeles resident has had a successful career as an adult film director. On the other hand, he has been the frontman/lead singer of the alternative metal band Society 1. When Crash Music released The Years of Spiritual Dissent in 2006, it seemed that Zane was giving up porn to concentrate on music full-time. But Zane's work in the adult entertainment industry continued; Zane continued to have both a porn career and a music career, and that is a good thing because a lot of metal fans are also porn fans. If someone who knows Zane for adult films decides to check out Society 1 out of curiosity, he/she will hear a respectable alt-metal band with an attractive, industrialized sound that has been influenced by White Zombie, Godflesh, Ministry, and Sepultura — and that sound is holding up nicely on Live and Raw, which mainly focuses on a June 2006 show in L.A. (except for a few bonus tracks at the end of the CD). Zane is in generally fine form on Live and Raw, performing a lot of songs from 2003's Exit Through Fear (including "Fornicate," "Nothing," "Hate," "Kill Myself," "No One" and "Me") as well as some material from 2005's The Sound That Ends Creation ("Six Months," "Lord") and the title track of 1999's Slacker Jesus. The sound quality on "Wretched," one of the bonus tracks, isn't as good as the sound quality on the rest of the 42-minute disc. But if Live and Raw isn't quite an ideal document of Society 1's live show, it is still a very good one — and for the most part, this CD does a fine job of capturing the explosive energy that Zane's band projects on-stage.