Crossfaith + Silent Screams + Coldrain + Cytota @ The Institute, 21 November 2014
When you’re going to a gig in Birmingham and you really want to check out the support you can bet the local traffic will have something to say about that, and in typical fashion the M6 decided for me that I wouldn’t be seeing Cytota or Coldrain this evening.
I’d especially wanted to catch Cytota, them being local and having caught up with new lead vocalist Griffin Dickinson while the Crossfaith tour was in Belgium earlier in the month. My disappointment was compounded by later learning that the lads absolutely smashed it — there aren’t many bands that can cover up a technical issue with a silent circle pit! I also learned that Coldrain kept up the tempo, their post-hardcore and experience playing to much larger crowds back home in Japan going down well with the packed Institute Library.
I was particularly surprised to learn about the successes of the first two bands as when I arrived Silent Screams had not long started their set and the crowd seemed pretty flat, the sort of reception that is usual for an opening band rather than a main support. I’m not sure there was anything particularly wrong with their melodic hardcore; vocalist Joel Heywood hit some impressive guttural lows and was offset with decent clean vocals by bass player Tom Craig, all backed by techy riffs delivered with real energy, it just all seemed to miss the mark this evening. Requests for circle pits and walls of death were either ignored or short lived and reactions between songs were muted. The best reaction was probably for ‘Til There’s Nothing Left, which saw Heywood screaming lyrics from the crowd.
The stage rebuild for Crossfaith did take a while, but understandably so, with their awesome lighting rig, illuminated ego risers and Terufumi Tamano’s impressive pearlescent white drum kit. The interlude was filled with a dance track and announced countdown to the start of the headline set, which managed to get the crowd moving better than Silent Screams did. The room darkened, and each of the members of the band was welcomed one by one to the stage amidst chants of the bands name.
Starting out with We Are The Future, the immediate hit of bass did damage that would have your ears ringing until Tuesday, but with Crossfaith that’s just the beginning, live drums and guitars and Kenta Koie’s screamed vocals all layer to deliver one hell of a sound. Stood right next to the sound desk, I could see how hard their own sound engineer was working to balance all of the elements, and for me it was a complete success.
Between tracks Koie made reference to Birmingham’s metal heritage and asked that the crowd show him their metal souls, they obliged with a wall of death for opening of Countdown To Hell. The band were also very kind in providing refreshments for those at the front of the crowd, showering them with mouthfuls of Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle.
After Scarlett and Photosphere the stage darkened and Koie swapped to a 50’s style illuminated mic, (similar to that used by Dez Fafara of Devil Driver) for one of their new tracks, Madness. A bit of a change of pace and not dissimilar to a NIN type sound at the start, it sounded great and unlike some bands that try out new material live, kept the crowd moving.
After rounding out the main part of their set with Eclipse, they were welcomed back for an encore that started out with a blistering drum solo by Terufumi Tamano. His drumming really has to be seen live, his showmanship is similar to the ‘Mad Drummer’ but definitely not style over substance. The instantly recognizable Monolith and Leviathan sandwiched a cover of the Prodigy’s Omen that sent the crowd into overdrive, and the number of crowd surfers more than kept the security busy. They finished by all taking a bow together and promising they’d be back next year to the UK which they now consider to be a second home.
There are some things that really shouldn’t work when you put them together, but for some reason actually do. In the same way that dipping French fries into milkshake is pretty awesome, the way Crossfaith combine post-hardcore with dubby dance really works, and gets a crowd moving in a way that has to be seen to be believed. Whether it’s rave-metal, dance-core, or metallic-post-dub-core-step, I’m not sure, however I do know that it really works and it will mean that Crossfaith will be playing to much larger rooms the next time they headline the UK.
Review: Steve Kilmister
Photographs: Ian Dunn