Time Warped: Black Tide

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IT'S NOT SURPRISING that Black Tide bassist Zakk Sandler has Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" as his cell-phone ringback. After all, his band's debut, 2008's "Light From Above" (Interscope) — recorded when all the members were under 20 — sounds like an unearthed melodic-metal album from the '80s.

What is surprising is how utterly steeped in '80s metal culture Sandler and his three Black Tide co-horts are despite all of them barely being zygotes when David Lee Roth was spreading his legs in stadiums around the world.

"I don't care for anything new," Sandler said during a break from the Warped Tour, which is where Black Tide is spending much of its summer — much to the band's chagrin. Black Tide would be much happier playing the Monsters of Rock — in 1984.

"We definitely feel like the black sheep because we're so different," Sandler said. "It's kind of a weird feeling because we're used to doing tours where we're not in that situation, but now that we are it's like, 'That kind of sucks.'"

Not that the Warped audience minds Black Tide's sound, which combines the thrashiness of early Metallica and Anthrax, the gallop of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden and the grungy-singalong qualities of Nirvana and Silverchair. Sandler even admits that the reception at the mall-punk-swarmed Warped has "been better than we thought."

But it's not the folks in the crowd that bug Black Tide, whose members have attended Warped in the past.

"I went to a few Warped Tours," Sandler said, "but it wasn't to see Warped Tour [type] bands. I'd see NOFX or Anti-Flag when they're on it, but I'd go to see Avenged Sevenfold and Bullet for My Valentine — they were up-and-coming bands at the time."

Now, Sandler said, he can't get past the Hot Topic-ness of Warped.

"I relate Katy Perry to all this," he said. "It's garbage music."

The music Sandler cites as not being poo-poo is of the vintage variety, including The Doors and Guns 'N Roses, and he says, "The only bands I've been listening to in the last year are The Rolling Stones and The Toadies."

And don't forget Van Halen and Twisted Sister, whose "Hot for Teacher" and "We're Not Gonna Take It" videos were direct inspirations for Black Tide's "Shout" clip.

"Yeah, definitely. That whole blow-up-the-school kind of thing," Sandler said, even though he's not too crazy about the end result. "The original idea for that video was a lot different from how it came out. When we picked that video, we thought it was being done by somebody else — we read the wrong treatment. We thought there was a lot more going on than was actually shown."

Perhaps Black Tide should try to simplify things for its next video and just do a stage performance a la "Jump." But here's a tip straight from David Lee's vintage metal crotch: start stretching.

» Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, Md.; Tue., July 14, 11 a.m., $32.75; 800-551-7328.

» RELATED: "Trash Comes in All Flavors: The Warped Tour" feature [Express, July 2009]

Photo courtesy Adrenaline PR