Dethklok plunged Phoenix fans into a brutal, metal cartoon

The official name of the tour that Dethklok and Amon Amarth opened on Wednesday at the Arizona Financial Theatre is the Amonklok Conquest Tour, one of the running Dethklok jokes being misspellings, parodic portmanteaux and almost everything prefixed with deth- or suffixed with -klok. The unofficial name, the name announced from the stage by fictional frontman Nathan Explosion, and therefore the more real and more metal and more brutal and more awesome name, is the Blood Fire Tits Iceballs Show Tour, all of which were abundantly available (in animated form, at least), except possibly for the iceballs part.

For anyone whose parents didn’t let them watch Adult Swim in their formative years, here’s the lore on Dethklok, the group at the heart of the animated series “Metalocalypse.” They’re a five-piece death metal band composed of Swedish lead guitarist Skwisgar Skwigelf (taller than a tree), Norwegian lead guitarist Toki Wartooth (not a bumblebee), American bassist William Murderface (Murderface! Murderface!), nasally Midwesterner Pickles the Drummer (doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee) and Floridian frontman (and George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher lookalike and soundalike) Nathan Explosion (EXPLOSION!), are nothing other than the blackest, most brutal, most metal band ever to exist anywhere (no exaggeration), not to mention the world’s third largest economy (an absolutely true fact you can totally look up or whatever).

This band, Dethklok, inspires cultic devotion in its fans (despite maiming, dismembering, disemboweling, mutilating and otherwise perpetrating grievous bodily harm upon droves of them at every concert), and is at the center of myriad global conspiracies monitored, and occasionally orchestrated, by the Tribunal, presided over by the imposing Mr. Salacia, with Senator Stampingston (voice of Mark Hamill) its master of ceremonies. There’s also some stuff about an ancient prophecy and either preventing or bringing about the Metalocalypse. These exploits unspool in ten- and 15-minute episodes (plus an animated opera and a full-length animated movie) over four seasons of a cartoon that airs late at night.

In “Metalocalypse” the show, the odds of a given fan surviving intact to the end of a Dethklok concert are vanishingly small, the kind of odds physicists with heavy accents calculate on special computers, but in Phoenix, on the opening night of the tour, all fans seemed to remain hale and whole, the only brutality in evidence of the aural rather than physical variety.

The current tour (Amonklok Conquest or Blood Fire Tits Iceballs Show, take your pick) marks 20 years of Dethklok, and its universe was all here. The band’s manager, Charles Foster Offdensen (CFO for short), and your old pal Facebones (an exuberant flayed, floating skull who appears in the band’s employee training videos) even joined the show (by way of a prerecorded video because cartoon characters can’t actually stand on a stage — duh) to celebrate the Klokiversary (20 years of palling around, laughter, and brutality) and make a special announcement for the fans who have been there from the beginning — basically, talk to your doctor about which erectile dysfunction medication is right for you so you can get back to a normal, healthy sex life of jacking off to social media. Facebones returned in a later video interlude with helpful concert tips for how not to be a dickweed while on drugs (because nobody wants to carry your dumpy ass): Don’t take more drugs than you can handle. (That’s only one tip, but it’s a pretty good one.)

In the Dethklok world, every show ends in mayhem and a deluge of gore. Not so in Phoenix (although it would have been totally metal and totally brutal if it had). And yet it wouldn’t be a Dethklok show without something going wrong. When guitarist, singer, and Dethklok creator Brendon Small and the rest of the touring band opened with “Deththeme” (the theme from the show, obviously), it turned out to be an unintentional experiment in everybody playing different parts of the same song at the same time. After briefly conferring to figure out the stage monitors and so forth, Small, speaking as Nathan Explosion, announced, “Pretend like you didn’t see any of this shit and we just came out here.” The crowd cheered, and Dethklok performed “Deththeme” again, in sync this time. Sound remained a problem for the rest of the night, never attaining the clarity and balance of mix that were evident in Amon Amarth’s set. Death metal, depending as it does on subtleties of rhythm and vocal delivery, suffers greatly when a muddy mix makes everything sound pretty much the same.

Still, the audience could still tell that it was a great — nay, brutal — performance. With music videos playing on the screen behind the stage, and the lights down to take attention away from the players onstage (except for some stray light that occasionally illuminated Small’s hands as they shredded his trademark Gibson Explorer), the band played the favorites — including “Awaken” (summoning a giant troll from the depths of a Scandinavian lake), “Murmaider” (murder by mermaids, of course), “Dethsupport” (American healthcare, the brutality of which can make anyone cower in fear), “Burn the Earth” (an anti-environmental ode to the resource-intensive technique of recording directly to water, as seen in Episode 3 of Season Two), “Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle,” (“Duncan Hills will wake you / from a thousand deaths”), and “Birthday Dethday” (“RSVP please / for the death of me”) — as well as some brand new tunes, the titles of which were hard to make out (again with the mix). One of the videos had something to do with the (cartoon) band members fighting a space battle.

Following a short audio interlude with CFO explaining to Nathan that the band had fulfilled its contractual obligations and didn’t have to play any more music, the audience cheered for more. Dethklok obliged with a short encore (including that old chestnut from Episode 2 of Season One, “Thunderhorse,” with its hypnotically simple lyrics, consisting only of the words thunder and horse, and its hilarious porno-medieval music video). When the lights came up, Small, interacting with the audience as himself for the first time of the evening, introduced the players onstage before they bowed and walked off. Fans kept chanting the tripartite monosyllabic demand — one more song — because even after 20 years of palling around with Dethklok, we’re always ready for more Dethklok.