Alestorm + Tyr –
Nottingham Rock City April 29th 2009 : Review by Steve Green and Sam
Thomas.
Photos by SamIt was kind of funny queuing up outside for this gig. To the right of the venue,
prepared for a night in the dingy basement of the Rock City were a
collection of hairy Metalheads and a collection of pirates, dressed
in full get-up including swords, muskets and even an inflatable
parrot!!! To the left, funny looking emo kids dressed in horrible
day-glo garb, rushing in to see Madina Lake… the poor sods.
With the doors opening at 7.30 and a promise of Heidevolk onstage
within 30 minutes, at least according to the running order posted on
the wall, things were looking good. Except that Heidevolk weren't
actually playing on the UK leg of the tour and we had to wait a long
boring hour before Tyr finally hit the stage. |
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I have a lot of time for Tyr.
They seem to get better with each tour I see them on (this being the
third time I've seen them live) and new album, By The Light Of The
Northern Star, which is due out at the end of May, has hardly been
out of my cd player since I received it a couple of weeks ago.
Opening number on the album, the impossibly catchy Hold The Heathen
Hammer High, is also the perfect opener tonight, and despite a
rather muddy mix, it still shines through. Front man Heri Joensen is
much more confident now and his in-between banter was hilarious,
especially the reference about Madina Lake playing upstairs: "Every
time an emo kid cries, a Viking comes from the Pagan lands and
dismembers him". And this fun attitude means that there's no
pressure tonight as Tyr battle through a set of old and new
material, from Tróndur í Gøtu and the aforementioned Hold The
Heathen Hammer High, which fitted in seamlessly with older standards
such as Sinklars Visa, Hail To The Hammer, Wings of Time and a
smattering of tracks from Eric The Red, including The Wild Rover,
which went down a storm, and a rousing finale of Ólavur Riddararós
and Ramund Hin Unge. Tyr left the stage to a wall of well deserved
applause, before sneaking back on to perform an encore of Thin
Lizzy's Whiskey In The Jar, which sounded more like Metallica's |
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version than the Lizzy original. It didn't really do it for me, but
the Guitar Hero generation down the front went crazy for it.
As much as I enjoyed their set tonight, I still think there's more
to come from Tyr, especially when they include a few more numbers
from By The Light Of The Northern Star, which I'm sure were written
with the live environment in mind. (Steve) |
Alestorm:
I’d not previously had the pleasure of encountering the salty
Scottish seamen live before, but, based on “Leviathan” and a sneak
listen to upcoming “Black Sails at Midnight” I’d formed the opinion
that, whilst they aren’t the most accomplished or talented of bands
at recording, they should be reasonably entertaining live. I was
expecting their live act to be a kind of Turisas-as-pirates
pastiche, with a lot of ho-ho-ho-ing, and jolly capering pirates.
Well, there were plenty of pirates. Unfortunately they were confined
to the audience, who’d clearly had a great time raiding their
toddler relatives’ dressing-up boxes. Alestorm themselves had the
presentation skills of, well, a bunch of kids from a Perth housing
estate. And sadly, that wasn’t the only skill they lacked. They
couldn’t organise the sound check, leaving Christopher Bowes’
keyboard silenced for the first couple of numbers. And I now know
what the stage worse than not being able to organise a piss-up in a
brewery is- it’s not being able to organise a single beer for
yourself on stage... I suppose that pirate metal should be chaotic,
but it should be a kind of creative chaos. This was just a mess.
They cavorted through a selection of songs old and new, “Leviathan”,
“Terror on the High Seas”, “Nancy the Tavern |
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Wench”, “That Famous ol’
Spiced”, “Wenches and Mead” to name but a few, which were greeted
with rapturous delight by the audience, leaving me in a minority of
two thinking that this was a complete load of bollocks. I’m not
saying that I’d rather have been upstairs with Kerrang! darlings
Madina Lake, but after eight or so tracks we headed for the hills,
and an evening with “The Apprentice”. Now there’s a man who knows
how to run a tight ship... (Sam) |
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Pestilence, Vreid, The New Dominion
London The Underworld 12/4/2009 Review by James Young
It’s rare you can say that you witnessed a moment in metal history,
but tonight surely fitted in this category, as the highly
influential Pestilence made their return to English soil, the first
in over a decade.
The opening band, The New Dominion,
as their name suggests, are pretty new on the scene, forming in only
2006, and as such most of their material came from their debut album
‘…And Kindling Deadly Slumber’. Their music was not the most ‘new’
sound ever, blending the melodic leads of At The Gates with the
occasional thrash, death metal and metalcore moment. Luckily, this
was very easy on the ear, and this was an enjoyable half hour of
melodic death metal. The set certainly became more enjoyable as it
progressed, with some of the heftier and more brutal numbers coming
later in the set. The vocals of frontman Bart were ferocious
throughout, although the clean vocals may not have been to
everyone’s liking (heck, do they belong in death metal at all?), but
they certainly fitted the more mellow moments. With guitar hooks as
defined as vocalist Bart’s six pack, and melodies catchier than the
Swine Flu, this band is one to look out for in the future.
Tonight marked Vreid’s second
show in London in just a couple of months, and whilst not a bad
thing - their blend of Viking, black’n’roll and sheer Norwegian
attitude is a joy to behold - one cannot help but feel that they
were lost on an audience who sat more in the death metal camp.
Forty-five minutes of everything that’s great about extreme music
was welcomed rather coldly by the London audience, but nevertheless
songs such as the title track from the new album ‘Milorg‘, and of
course the mandatory headbanger ‘Raped By Light’ went down a treat.
Ese’s guitar work is always a joy to behold, in all its widdly
glory, and although the bass was slightly lower in the mix than on
their last outing, Jarle "Hváll" Kvåle’s plucking sounded as
muscular as ever. As I put in their last review, these Norsemen have
proven themselves to be far more than ex-Windir members trying to
live up to their history, and have proven themselves as a class act
in their own right.
Let’s face it though, we were all here to see
Pestilence, and they took to the stage in a ‘Devouring
Frenzy’, after a call to beat and stab one another from frontman
Patrick Mameli. Admittedly, it did take a while for the band to get
into gear, especially with the decidedly weird presence and stage
banter of Mameli. The new songs did not seem to click, and in a live
environment the intensity of some of the newer tracks like ‘Horror
Detox’ sounded more akin to their older style which was a tad
frustrating. However, when the Dutchmen did reach their maximum
speed, which only took a few songs, and with Malleus Maleficarum’s
‘Chemo Therapy’ at that, they were absolutely unstoppable. Mameli’s
solo trade-offs with Patrick Uterwijk were jaw-dropping, and Tony
Choy’s bass work was out of this world, proving why he is one of the
greatest bassists of all time. Behind the drum kit, Peter Wildoer
was the newest member of the band, but pulled off the older material
with precision and twice as much technicality. Choy and himself were
even given a spotlight to show off their exquisite jazz-fusion
skills in a nice little solo section, which would have pleased any
fans of Atheist or Spheres-era Pestilence. Speaking of this
underrated album, we were fortunate enough to hear the title track
‘Mind Reflections’ played in all its technical glory. Needless to
say, a lot of material was from the new album, with about half of it
played tonight, but we still had a sizeable representation of their
breakthrough Testimony Of The Ancients in the form of ‘Lost Souls’
and ‘The Secrecies Of Horror’. The thrashtastic Consuming Impulse
also found its way onto the setlist, in the form of ‘The Process Of
Infection’, ‘Chronic Infection’, and the amazing encore ‘Out Of The
Body’. The set was not without it’s flaws, but even still, it
remains as one of the greatest death metal performances this decade,
and anyone who turned up can say they witnessed something very
special indeed |
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