Not so acoustic, but great

Jonathan Davis wore a black suit and sat in a red velvet-cushioned wooden chair that looked like a throne. If that wasn’t strange enough, his band members wore suit jackets or vests and button-down shirts. There were candelabras on stage as well at Davis’ performance at Tremont on Wednesday.

It wasn’t what I'd expected from the frontman for Korn, which gave us slit-your-wrist hits such as “Blind” and “Freak on a Leash.”

The setup for his solo show reminded me of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but man did he rock. Advertised as an acoustic set, it was anything but a typical guitar-strumming-love-songs gig. His backing band used a drum kit, electric violin, keyboards, upright bass and a guitar. And Davis didn’t lull fans with yearning vocals. He screamed until my throat was raw.

Several hundred people filed into Tremont for the show. I’m not a Korn fan, so I didn’t recognize any of the songs. But fans told me one was the Korn hit “Falling Away From Me,” and that many of others were tracks Davis co-wrote for the “Queen of the Damned” soundtrack. The performance made me want to go watch the movie again.

The tunes often began with Caribbean- or Middle Eastern-style drumming or instrumentation, then climaxed with Korn’s nu-metal energy. It’s a combination that I'd never heard before, but I dug it.