By Jase Walker
We’re fully in festival season now and the gigs slow down a little bit in the lead up to the swathes of massive festivals across the ÜK and Europe with Ice Nine Kills making one of their last stops before Download at Manchester’s main Academy venue.
This is a four band show today on a bright, sunny, and warm Sunday evening. The bill in total has Defying Decay, Lansdowne, SKYND and finally Ice Nine Kills and looks to take us right up until tonight’s 11pm curfew. There’s also an unbelievably massive queue down Oxford Road outside of the venue as well, almost as if the entire venue capacity has turned up for doors, which is just as well because Defying Decay are on literally 15 minutes after the doors open.
Defying Decay opted to get on stage a little bit earlier and there is a lot of them on stage, seven of them! Here from Bangkok, Thailand as well, I’m always down for a bit of east Asian metal and Defying Decay are not disappointing with their saturated sound with both a keys player and DJ adding in layering. I feel like there may be a bit too much reverb that isn’t helping their sound a lot as there’s much less people in the venue by this point than I expected considering the queue outside. Defying Decay are killing it though regardless, great dynamic light show, they’re managing to move around a lot on stage despite room being somewhat at a premium.
It’s also fantastic seeing them also use multiple vocals for layering too, I’ve got a real soft spot for metal that’s got a really thick and saturated sound where there’s a lot going on. To their credit as well, they did a solid job of getting a circle pit going as well, solid job for an opening act especially when they’re on so early. They’ve done a solid job of opening today and will definitely be a band I’ll check more of in future! The cover of My Chemical Romance’s ‘Black Parade’ was quite unexpected as well but clearly welcomed by the crowd happily shouting along.
Lansdowne are next. I’m sure I’ve heard of these before but I can’t for the life of me remember where. I have to be honest, I’m not connecting with this at all, the performance feels very flat and not particularly engaging and going off the crowd’s response, it would appear they feel pretty similar. Looking around, I can’t really see much movement even when the apparent heavy bits hit, the singer manages to get some crowd participation going with arm waving but it doesn’t exactly keep going very long. I would suppose neither the crowd or myself have a particularly big appetite for middle of the road dude bro metal with a pretty mediocre live performance. Swing and a pretty massive miss this set.
For the last and main support for tonight, SKYND is up next. I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about this somewhat unusual performance but I do love my more weird stuff so let’s see how SKYND does it. With a bit of a weird switch in vocal styles on the intro, with what seems like an unusual pitch shift being used, they kick into the main chorus parts and they sound much stronger with a voice that reminds me a bit of Lzzy Hale. Compared to Defying Decay, there’s much fewer people on stage as well with just the three of them. The use of vocal pitch shifts continues throughout the set along with heavy use of effects on the bass and synth backing tracks to give additional depth. Admittedly it’s not really my cuppa tea but it’s a pretty damn fun performance to watch and experience though.
Admittedly the crowd response seems a bit lacklustre as well, there’s a fair chunk of SKYND T-shirts that I’ve seen so they’ve got fans in the venue but the audience energy isn’t really there sadly. It’s not really the first gig I’ve been at where the audience is there almost solely to get drunk and watch the headline act, not exactly uncommon. They do get solid rounds of applause and the like when finishing songs which is more than I can say for Lansdowne at least. I would say a lot of the crowd is probably trying to take in SKYND for the first time as I can see quite a fair amount of phones recording the performance so it’s not all bad, just a bit lukewarm on the whole. The performance is definitely weird though, and seeing artists do this sort of thing to establish a unique identity is something I’m a huge proponent of. On the whole, I enjoyed it, a really solid performance that’s worthy of the positive gossip I’ve heard, it’s not for me really but would fully recommend people check ’em out.
Finally tonight, Ice Nine Kills and their horror film historia performance. Prior to the band coming on stage, the music has switched from regular songs to what sounds like the Psycho soundtrack while the crowd begins bouncing around loads.of balloons and is loudly booing any unfortunate balloon popping mishaps. Another gear switch on the music of ‘Walking On Sunshine’, which is all just a bit weird really, entertaining though. Taking the stage in suits with dickie bows and their singer brandishing a spade, the crowd suddenly erupts into life along with the stage lighting, a near constant set of strobing lights. Their low end is absolutely pounding and shakes the air around my head all the while the crowd, who were notably silent until now, are loudly screaming every single word. The random horror elements that pop up throughout the show include a chainsaw wielding guy with a goat head as well as a ghostly looking girl providing the singer with props for him to ‘murder’ someone on stage.
I fucking love an entertaining stage show and I can remember being blindsided with how much I enjoyed INK‘s performance at Download last year. Suddenly the singer reappears with a Patrick Bateman apron and axe and re-enacts the axe murder scene from American Psycho, this show absolutely does not pull any punches with its adoration for horror films. Brandishing the Necronomicon and the hand saw from Evil Dead for ‘Ex-Mørtis’, they’re extremely well equipped for each of the songs on the set tonight. Even a feature of Georgie from IT while their singer apes Pennywise for ‘IT Is The End’. Brandishing crosses, while causing absolute chaos in Manchester Academy, the smoke and flashing lights results in the crowd surfers being thrown over the top to be just silhouettes bouncing off the crowd.
The Freddie Kruger glove with its blades for ‘The American Nightmare’ or a knife and ‘shower curtain’ for ‘The Shower Scene’, the band’s adoration for Hollywood’s greatest horror films is made real with how they put it into practice not just with the music but also the live performance. Also not one, but two leatherfaces for ‘SAVAGES’, spoiled for the terrifying prospect of being cut to bits by chainsaw. Blasting through the rest of the set and getting a nod to Candyman and brandishing his iconic hook, for ‘Farewell II Flesh’ we arrive at the end of their set. Despite being a late finish, we’ve got time for one last song on the encore, ‘Welcome To Horrorwood’ to wrap up a bloody fantastic set from these.
A bit of a mixed bag on the whole I suppose but the headline act is definitely someone you should check out even if you’re not particularly big on metalcore. They’ll be back soon no doubt, they’re on a hell of a roll right now!
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