The blues are the foundation on which all modern music is built. If you slice hard enough into any current genre, be it black metal or be it trap hop you will eventually find the blues. It is a quintessential cornerstone of everything we consider to be rock, pop, dance or metal. Sometimes it's a hidden, almost silent ingredient, but in others, it is worn very much on the sleeve. Tonight, is a case of the latter as this is a trilogy of young (-ish) bands delving into the past and creating authentic retro-blues rock that sounds like it has been plucked from an episode of old Grey Whistle test circa 1971.
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Tonight it's all about the unbridled power of heavy metal. The pairing of the thrash revivals unsung heroes Warbringer and this week's hottest new band in Britain, Hellripper is genius. And I am not alone in thinking this marriage of convenience is manna from heaven as once again Manchester's metal hordes have swum against the cost-of-living crisis and more than adequately filled the place.
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I know I have become a broken record on this subject matter, but something fundamentally changed in regard to our collective relationship with live music over lockdown. I think we had started to take for granted the primal thrill of seeing a band in a live environment and we only began to really miss it once it was gone. Our daily dollars may not be going as far as they once did, but I have never seen the live scene this healthy.
Tonight the Academy is not just packed it is positively oversold. Every nook and cranny is crammed full of delirious souls desperate to escape the mundanity of modern life even just for a few hours.
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After years and years of tireless touring and recording, it looked like 2020's “Apocalypse & Chill” was going to be the record that finally propelled Delain into the big league. It had the songs, it had the exposure and it had the momentum. And then the pandemic happened and not a month into its promotional cycle we all went to hell in a handcart. Then just as the world was starting to righten itself again word came that Delain had fallen apart.
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I have always been drawn to the more avant-garde and obscure corners of metal's rich tapestry. When I was making my first faltering steps into the genre in the mid-80s, whilst my contemporaries had their heads turned by the commercial giants of Maiden, Priest and the rapidly ascending Metallica, I was seduced by bands offering a more difficult and select version of metal. My early adoration with musical mavericks such as Celtic Frost, Suicidal Tendencies, Queensryche (back when they were brilliant) and Voivod.
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There is something particularly joyous about watching a fledgling band take their first faltering steps into this world that we call rock 'n' roll. Deathbloom are both ridiculously young and also hedonistically cavalier in their attitude to metal’s tight templates. They take an irreverent approach, purloining the trappings they desire but also abandoning with disdain those cultural touchstones that they have no truck with. What we are left with is a raw and raucous amalgamation of influences from across the genre and out into both punk and Goth.
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As Bon Scott did declare, "It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock 'n' roll". Sabaton’s meteoric journey to the top of the metal’s pyre has been a marathon as opposed to a sprint. When I first spied them in 2006 (on the very tour that Par nostalgically refers to towards the end of their set) they were an identikit Scandinavian mid-table power metal act, virtually indistinguishable from the other identikit Scandinavian mid-table power metal acts that prowled around half empty club shows and early afternoon sets at Bloodstock.
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I look back at my posts from the Pandemic and I really was Mr. Pessimistic about the future of live shows. I worried that they would be a residual disinterest and anxiety about attending concerts once they resumed. Actually, the opposite has been true. Even though we are in the middle of the cost-of-living crisis and the vast majority of us are struggling financially, I have never seen the live music scene this healthy. It's almost as if we have exited lockdown with a different ideology and temperament.
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Extreme metal is in the main viewed as being Poe-faced and guilty of taking itself far too seriously. However, this evening is very much the antidote for those assumptions. Skálmöld and Finntroll make perfect touring partners because they both lean into a sense of euphoric abandonment, a quintessential sense of fun and frivolity. They also share a deep connection with their respective countries’ musical heritage. Yes, this is metal but is metal honed by the indigenous music of Iceland and Finland.
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Tonight proves that if you got charisma, personality, and just the right pinch of self-deprecation you don't need any other trappings to put on a show. You see last time the self-denounced Hevy Devy was in this very venue he brought a stunning undercard in the shape of Tesseract and Leprous, an imposing video wall, and thousands of pulsating lights. This evening is a much more modest affair with supports that their mothers would struggle to pick out of an identity parade and a scaled-back production.
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Well, it's all happening this evening at the student’s union. In the main Academy, the regions punk pensioners are on day release from their respective nursing homes in order to witness the umpteenth miraculous resurrection of Stiff Little Fingers. Upstairs in the pokey Academy Three, Indie upstarts The Rolling People are repackaging Britpop for the next generation and downstairs in the club Academy…. Well to be honest I'm not sure what the fuck is happening downstairs, but it has attracted a gaggle of younglings young enough to be my grandkids, in various states of undress and off their tits on Ketamine. It's a rare beast when the metal crowd is the normal bunch, but those of us winding our way up to the old debating hall for a Haken and Between the Buried and Me double-header seem positively conservative in our attire compared to some of the revellers cavorting around the building.
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It transpires that the Great British Classic Rock revival has found a fresh stream of inspiration to draw from. The dense 70’s blues rock of Free and vintage Quo, has been abandoned in favour of pillaging the fertile vineyards of eighties hair metal. For South of Salem, it provides a veritable smorgasbord of stimulation and they are meticulous in their level of imitation. Their second track in is so shrouded in familiarity, that if you close your eyes, its’s 1982, you’re in the whiskey a go-go and Mötley Crüe are treading the boards in their moment of ascendancy.
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It's very easy to lose a sense of perspective when you get the opportunity to review shows in arenas, theatres, and cavernous academies. But it takes evenings like tonight to remind you that minuscule basement venues like retro here in Manchester is where rock 'n' roll came from and, for the majority of the North-West scene, continues to dwell. Peter from The Black Spiders continually describes the confined surroundings as being someone’s living room, and he is not half wrong.
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Three years. It was three blooming years ago that this show was meant to happen. It is so long ago that both main acts are on different album cycles to the one that the show was originally meant to be part of, and the undercard has changed at least four times since it was originally announced. There has been so much to-ing and fro-ing at the bottom end of the bill that there seems to be a general sense of bewilderment as the masses wander to be greeted by the frat party thrash of Municipal Waste.
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You do have to feel sorry for Gus G. He is one of the world's most sought-after guitarists (a modern-dayYngwie Malmsteen). For the last twenty-five years, with his main outfit Firewind, he has been a stalwart in keeping power metal's ornate flag flying. Yet here he is (with Firewind) supporting in a subterranean club that is probably smaller in size than his front room. The indignity is probably made even more pertinent by the fact that tonight's headline act, Beast in Black, have been in existence for a mere fraction of the time that Firewind have been hauling themselves across the globe. However, if Mr G does feel any level of petulance about the introverted nature of tonight’s billing, he certainly doesn't show it.
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In a world of nonconformity, Dream Theater are strident nonconformists. For nearly 40 years they have defiantly bucked the trends and ignored metal's prevailing winds. They have managed to operate in their own cryogenically sealed bubble, immune from passing fashions or fads. They initially emerged at a point in time when everything had gone short and spiky (song length, hair length, and stature of lead singers) and they defiantly ploughed their own field. Resolutely un-vogue from conception, they have built a fevered fan base through word of mouth, hard work, and by never wavering from their steadfast belief that more is definitely more.
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I need to be honest and say that this is one of those reviews where objectivity goes out the window. You see, for me, Sólstafir and Katatonia represent the finer points of modern metal. I adore, with a heartfelt passion, both acts, and, in my eyes, they illustrate how metal is evolving as an art form.Sólstafir’s bleak metallised sonic landscapes speak to my lifelong love for Springsteen, whilst Katatonia have taken remorseless doom and made it utterly beautiful. This long-delayed but much-anticipated tour brings them both together in what can only be a win-win scenario for those who like their metal based on emotion and pathos. The Ritz is not heaving, but there is a good-sized crowd in and the number of couples that I see in his and hers matching Sólstafir and Katatonia T-shirts shows that there is a massive cross-section in their two fan bases.
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A source of perennial discussion at ROCKFLESH Towers is the question of what is metal. I have even gone so far as write a 666 on the subject. These deliberations are usually a prelude to the much thornier question of do we cover this or do we cover that band. The simple truth is that Leprous are probably beginning to orbit away from our world. Their last couple of albums have exited metal completely, with “Pitfalls” being a wonderful exercise in baroque pop, and “Aphelion” having the same relationship with metal that homoeopathy has with common sense. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to cover them, as they, metal or not metal, are quite simply an astounding live act.
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Somewhere along the way Dying Fetus has become a big deal. Tonight, is near enough a sell-out, with over 500 tickets being shifted for a death metal gig on a Monday night. This is usually the graveyard shift and the reserve of no more than fifty or so aging men who should know better, slamming into each other as a last-gasp attempt to retain their youth. But not this evening, the vast majority of people here are young, really young. I would go as far as to say that a good proportion of them weren’t even conceived when I first clasped eyes on Dying Fetus supporting Nile at the late lamented Jilly's back in 2005.
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You can't help but feel sorry for our Tarja. In Lisbon on the 7th of March 2020, she embarked on an envisaged mammoth tour of continental Europe to support the release of her latest album, “In the Raw”. What was meant to be a glorious celebration of her rapidly ascending profile, unceremoniously ground to a halt in Bilbao after a solitary four shows. It was the dawn of the global pandemic and borders were slamming shut all over Europe.
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