Warriors Of Genghis Khan – by Kos...
At the end of a pretty hectic week of band watching I went to the New Wave of American Heavy Metal gig at the Liverpool Academy on Friday.
I should probably say at this point that I'm not a fan of old school metal, I have real problems relating to nasty faded denim, hair from Timotei adverts, galloping guitars, fog horn vocals and lyrics about goblins so I'm not viewing this return of widdly guitar solos with much joy, I mean Chimaira had synchronised head banging and shape throwing from the guitarists...
I'm all for a bit of showmanship but it's all getting a bit 1988 around here if you ask me, don't let Eddie Vedder have suffered for nothing...
I saw half of God Forbid's set due to finishing work late and was pretty impressed, they sounded a bit nu metally with downtuned guitars and the singer had a great voice, it was just the inserting of very technical solos at random points that took away from the songs.
The next band up was Shadows Fall, these were a bit more thrashy and one of the guitarists had the great Cookie Monster voice that signifies the devil is indeed here and channelling himself through the singers outrageous dreads.
This set went really quickly and I did enjoy them to the point that I might go through the trauma of downloading a couple of songs to see if the cd's worth buying. At one point a circle pit started and I was amazed that I hadn't been killed years ago when I used to be stupid enough to go into them...
Chimaira played Liverpool last February but I missed them so I was looking forward to seeing them, they sounded a bit like Slipknot and they also had the obligatory useless member who shouted now and again, pressed a button to play a sample, threw himself around a bit and tipped bottles of water on himself, hard work being in a band these days...
They were enjoyable and had a new twist on the pit situation, at the start of the song they split the crowd down the middle by about 8 feet, counted in the next song and each side of the floor ran at the other. There were some spectacular collisions and it raised the fear levels considerably.
The headliners were Killswitch Engage, these fall into the Post Hardcore variety (kind of emo kids with an Eddie from Iron Maiden backpack instead of an Elmo one).
In my review of the last album I said that the singer had an amazing voice and it definitely carries over live even when he's bouncing up and down. The lead guitarist must have seen 'More Bad News' repeatedly as he seemed to base the whole of his performance on Colin Grigson (Rik Mayal's character).
Within the first 40 seconds he ran across the stage 4 times, spun his guitar around his head, pulled a variety of faces and licked his guitar neck, basically he was like a 3 year old chimp with ADD off his face on Panda lemonade and speed.
They were amazingly tight but I guess when a band's as technical as that they have to be.
It was a pretty interesting night, not totally my kind of music but there was some good stuff there.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home