These ‘Sidewave’ shows may be only the side dish to the main course (Soundwave), but the menu was chock-full of tasty heavy music morsels at Billboard this evening.
These ‘Sidewave’ shows may be only the side dish to the main course (Soundwave), but the menu was chock-full of tasty heavy music morsels at Billboard this evening.
All That Remains are very much clichéd American metalcore. And the lead vocalist leads the stereotyped charge, as he has the act down pat: short hair, baseball cap, sleeveless black T-shirt and much full-sleeve tats. There’s also the typical American-metalcore vocal delivery and even between song ‘banter’. He owns the Metalcore Lead Singer Instructional book and was milking for all it was worth. The band behind him are certainly tight and powerful enough. A slight point of difference was the chick on bass, who was also howling like a banshee, but who was actually pretty damn good.
There are at least six or seven bands who play this style of music who are completely interchangeable with each other, and All That Remains are one of them. For the undemanding metalcore fan, they are definitely the shit, however.
Things stepped up several notches with the criminally underrated (in this country at least) Ill Nino taking the stage. The person accompanying me this evening described their sound as ‘catastrophic’, and this struck me as extremely accurate. They absolutely tore the roof off Billboard, but did it with class and a very different vibe to a lot of the mainstream heavy music that’s out there right now. With their ‘Latin-metal’ stylings and full percussion set-up beside their short and stocky drummer, Ill Nino went completely off-tap, impressing the capacity Billboard crowd no end. After the cliché-ridden presentation of All That Remains, Ill Nino’s blistering set was a veritable breath of fresh air.
Very much bringing the evening back to a traditional modern metal climax, the ever-awesome Devildriver stormed the stage and brutalised the crowd with a rampaging hour-and-10 set (including encores). There was no subtlety here, no soaring melodic choruses, no percussion section, they simply went straight for the throat with their brand of balls-to-the-wall metal with main man Dez Fafara howling his lungs out. The band were air-tight, and after some initial issues, the sound was nuclear-strength deafening. The overall effect was, quite simply, devastating and Devildriver were sure to have won many new friends this night. All in all, this proved to be an extremely satisfying evening’s heaviosity.
Loved: Ill Nino’s spirit and diversity, Devildriver’s fist-to-the-face delivery.
Disliked: All That Remains’ ‘heard it all before’ vibe.
Drank: Crownies!
