@alpaca.presents by Brandon van der Berg @vdb.brandon The Sound Engineer for the night was Rowan
The night of the 23rd was up there with one of my favourite shows I’ve written about so far. Each band brought something entirely different and pungent but congruent and set each other up beautifully as a great bill does.
Read about the night below.
Chaos Sequence
Do you remember Jemaine Clement’s performance as ‘Boris’ in Men in Black 3? Chaos Sequence’s Bassist is a great replacement if Barry Sonnenfeld recasts in search of a better Rotten Tomatoes score.
Those cymbals are hammering aluminium panelling. Those salinized twirls emanated the dark, rich cult of Twilight’s ‘James’.
“IF YOU HEAR MY VOICE. FOLLOW IT.”
The singer, dominated fear. Marvelling the whites of his eyes under the pinched shadow of cap and face mask creates a definitive separation between crowd and stage, you and him. Although what I imagine to be taken as the unavoidable intimidation of a metal gig by some of the less emancipated audience members, his use of ruffing the crowd, jumping in to lyrically assault them in a “not touching can’t get mad” kind of way was, for one, a brilliant laugh to watch him win the very convincing standoffs, for two, shockingly immersive.
They come together to form a demonic oath of sin, rage and spasmodic squalor.
I know I’m really going off with the pop culture references in this one but LOTR’s Smaug is one too good to miss after experiencing the hellish roars, concussive percussion and surrealness of their threatening, piquantly fevering performance.
Find them on Instagram or Spotify
For Fans Of Yosemite In Black, Hyman Bronte and DEAD VELVET
Liquid State
Shattering, sightless noise punted off the road by a portable mushroom cloud, the concave upright quartet of LED posts in each corner shooting up the air with a royal blue of light, growing blurringly as the fake smoke melts and light shows spike jagged wires across the ceiling.
Blinking lights animate a stop motion bassist mid frenzy, a hand raises centre stage and the now crimson brights hit the singer. A binary of metal rock’a black and white shows a, maybe unintended, collaboration of the vintage horror of Frankenstein’s monster’s bride and Blue Banana. I see a lot of singers thin in timbre in the range she belted full-bodied with the accuracy of those kinds of guitarists who tune to exact, specific frequencies.
Except she didn’t prance around a declarative custom fender and pretentious IPA afterwards…
This was a seriously well-developed set. From the use of music video quality lighting, the subtle dress codes, the gradual incorporation of melodic dissonance, the build in performative intensity without feeling as if something is missing early on is altogether no cheap feat.
Halfway through the set something happened which was either a collective mental breakdown or a carefully scripted but phenomenal use of contrast, depending on your imagination. The once smooth melodic fission of pop and metal exploded into a cataclysmic symphony of obscure bodily expression. Squeamish wretched cries of blarted curdling queue changes from purple to angry red and syncopated, excuse my language, gosh darn fantastic fills twitched up an impulse to erupt into an almost military stand to attention.
Now I don’t talk no very good drummer speak, but that one intricate fill, where they flurried onto the inner bell of the cymbal before crashing into the song could level the pleasure Diary of a Wimpy Kid’s ‘Fregley’ felt picking his nose, tenfold.
Something I think is definitely worth mentioning is that lack of breaks and fronting in between songs can tire out some audience members that need a bit of a refresher between songs occasionally, especially with this octane of music.
By the end of the set, the band on stage was a vague memory of the one that got on, each member had drastically redbulled up their stage presence, the music was rabid and cathartic, whatever clean vocals remained were totally overthrown by feral screams, the great big disco ball of the Crofters Main Room hung in a lonely irony over a frantic light show, violently pulsing something akin to what happens when you give Class A’s to spiders and study the consequent webbing.
Because of the studies and pictures, not from personal experience
Find them on Instagram or Spotify
For Fans Of Queen Cult and Bring Me The Horizon
In Fear
“BRISTOL IF YOU’RE OUTSIDE, COME IN NOW”
Echoes into a vail of punches and wooden cracks
The first blow of vocals, absolute studio perfection.
Blackout flashes briefly blind the singer in pure white and leave the band scattered in a void and I recall thinking “That looks neat as f*ck”. The whole aesthetic of the stage is commendable and the patterned sheen on the singer brings out a real elegance in the punishing chaos throwing itself around the room.
The bassist slowly raising his finger to his lips, sternly ushering, has the defeating weight of Leatherface and nothing really compares to those growls of real life shock-horror monster noise.
The band took a song or two to warm up fully, but once they were there, there they stayed. The guitarist stage-left became a chasm of throws, folding and throwing a slamming kick maintaining a perfect equilibrium between being damn right radical and not eating sh*t from falling over on stage. Agonising curdling fries while the singer loses control of their body cumbersomely like the first troll you see in Harry Potter. Big breakdowns are where this band really shine performatively, the juxtaposition in their performance and music blurs your perception of time entirely at times resulting in a very distorted view of dissonance, very ‘DOOM: Eternal’.
The music is polished and buffed with some experimental existentialism and the drummer chugs through his kit with virtuosic fluidity. The epic energy those vocal harmonies add over skull-shattering riffs is fantastically harrowing.
Ending the set with 30k streamed “All Is. All Shall Be” Album-Track ‘Cessation’ which really lives up to the hype live, before the singer snap posed into angles like a puppet caught in its own strings.
“Thank you so much for spending your night with us, we are ending this tour with a f*cking bang because of you lot, thank you so much”
Find them on Instagram or Spotify
For Fans Of Of Mice & Men, Thy Art Is Murder and Glass Tides
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