Edition: U.S. / Global

Review/Rock; Growling, Gnashing And Much Moshing. As Usual.

Published: May 25, 1993

The audience came to mosh at Roseland on Saturday night, and so did the bands. With each song's first pounding, gnashing riff, the dance floor became a maelstrom of flailing arms and colliding bodies. As the bands played, members of Living Colour and Bad Brains climbed atop the speaker cabinets and leaped down onto the outstretched hands of fans, who passed them around and then carried them back to the stage. Even after the final encore, Vernon Reid, Living Colour's guitarist and founder, took one last jump.

The novelty has worn off the fact that Living Colour, four black musicians, play heavy metal, an overwhelmingly white genre. But as it settles in for the long haul, Living Colour keeps proving itself with remarkable musicianship that galvanizes audiences like the sold-out house at Roseland. Rock critics have complained that some of Living Colour's songs are didactic, but the crowd didn't seem to mind having the occasional conscientious message slipped in amid the furious crunch and improvisational frenzy of the music.

Where most hard-rock bands play rote, fixed performances of their repertories, Living Colour strives to make its music new every night. There's room for Mr. Reid's breakneck guitar squiggles (although in Saturday's set, he was so busy playing fast that he rarely let his guitar solos wail melodies), Will Calhoun's fusillades of drumming, Corey Glover's touches of scat singing and Doug Wimbish's syncopated, thumb-popped bass notes. Mr. Wimbish, who joined Living Colour for its third album, "Stain" (Epic), brings a deeper bottom to the band, but he can't resist ascending electronically up to the guitar's register, where he sometimes answers Mr. Reid's high lead lines.

Although it has taken some time, Mr. Glover has developed an effective stage presence: wild-eyed, sly, forthright but not humorless. He is now one of the most accomplished singers in hard-rock, capable of tensile long lines, soulful rasps and a strong, controlled falsetto. Singing "Bi" (with the chorus "everybody loves you when you're bi") he was almost campy, flirtatiously stroking his thighs; in "Go Away," a song about trying to buy a clear conscience through charity, he was grumpy on the verge of anger; in "Nothingness," a sustained elegy, he was almost tender; in "Elvis Is Dead," he growled with gleeful rage.

Although Living Colour thrives on its self-imposed musical challenges, complexity isn't the point. The songs move beyond the details of harmony and rhythm to sound like elemental forces, heaving or whizzing by. What comes through Living Colour's music is not self-righteousness, but exuberance: the music zooms, crashes, stomps and soars.

Living Colour learned some of its tactics from Bad Brains, the long-running hard-core band that was formed in 1978 and is about to release its first major-label album. In its short set, Bad Brains had its usual pinpoint precision in songs that whip lashed from slow heavy metal to fast punk-rock, then gave way to pure, leisurely reggae. For the finale, the two bands got together to play Funkadelic's "Cosmic Slop," pounding out the funk-metal hybrid that inspired them both.