Photos and review by: Jason Robey

CHARLOTTE, NC —The cold rainy Saturday night in Charlotte was no match for the crowd standing in line to get in the doors for an electrifying night of music at the Visulite Theatre. lespecial and Dizgo are kicking off their New Year’s End Times mini tour together, with the second night in Asheville, and New Year’s Eve in Atlanta. 

Dizgo, who last appeared in Charlotte just three weeks previous for a headlining show, took the stage in dramatic fashion, opening with the instrumental tune, “Whiteout.” From there, the band settled into their signature funk with “Honey,” with an extended jam morphing into a raucous cover of the Black Sabbath classic, “Paranoid.” The song took an unusual and interesting turn part way through, with a several-minutes-long, synthesizer-led jam, before transitioning back to finish the song.

The band was at the top of their game, feeding off a high energy crowd. The improv-heavy set featured extra jammy versions of “On the Groove” and “Liquefaction,” before a blazing 25-minute rendition of “Rainbow Lightning,” with a spacey instrumental section that sandwiched in a short take on the Romantics’ “Talking In Your Sleep” halfway through. Dizgo ended their set with an effect-laden and aptly titled “Outer Space,” into a relatively short-but-sweet run through Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein.”

lespecial brought their unique progressive jam metal to a dimly lit stage with the slow build up of “Snell’s Fleet,” from their 2020 album Ancient Homies. The trio masterfully wove razor sharp guitar riffs with trance-like synthesizer and gritty bass lines through their hour and a half set, focusing mostly on newer tracks from their latest album, Odd Times, like “Fear the Djinn,” “Divider,” and “Rays.” They took one trip back to their early days with “American Apocalypse,” driven by a pounding bass line that had the whole venue bouncing along with them.

Hot on the heels of the news that drummer Rory Dolan landed an audition for Primus, whose drummer recently left, lespecial took on a perfectly executed version of the Primus classic “Those Damn Blue Collar Tweekers” with a seamless transition in and out of “Laquer Head.” If that wasn’t convincing enough, the drum solo that followed left no doubt to this crowd of Dolan’s mesmerizing skills. The band went into the homestretch for the evening with a take on Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” that evolved from the metal anthem into an epic trance jam. As the band wound up the set with “Lungs of the Planet,” the crowd begged for one more. 

Check both Dizgo and lespecial on social media for 2025 tour dates!