bonecrusher fest live

Ever wake up in the morning and no matter what you do you can’t seem to motivate yourself? That, dear reader, was how I felt on the morning of the Bonecrusher Fest tour with me struggling to get up any enthusiasm whatsoever about travelling eighty or so miles on a crowded train to Leeds on a cold, wet and miserable day pondering how, with the doors due to open at 5pm and the last band due offstage at 10.40pm, no less than seven bands were going to be fitted into less than six hours.

Arriving at the venue about fifteen minutes before the doors were due to open to find the queue to be almost as long as it had been for the Paganfest at the same venue in 2008 I decided to visit one of the local pubs for a swift pint and come back five minutes or so after the doors had opened to save myself the hassle of queuing up... so imagine how my already unenthusiastic self felt when getting back to the venue to find that not only were the doors still not open but the queue was almost twice as long as it had been when I left!

Moaning done with (for the moment anyway), once I finally got into an already heaving Rio’s Manchester’s Ingested were already blasting away onstage to an impressively enthusiastic crowd. For me though the band are everything that’s wrong with modern brutal death metal – all horribly clicky drums turned up too loud and an overabundance of “slams” at the expense of memorable riffs and the merest hint of a decent song. Brutal for sure but they really didn’t do anything for me.

The next three bands have been rotating in order throughout the tour and tonight it was American deathcore outfit Carnifex’s turn to be the first of the three and I’m pretty sure if you look up the word “ordinary” in a dictionary you’d find a picture of Carnifex looking back at you. Basically if you’ve ever heard a band play half-arsed Gothenburg death metal riffs with the same tedious breakdown crowbarred haphazardly into every song then you’ve heard Carnifex.

After the tedium of Carnifex came the technical wizardry of The Faceless. I know people who absolutely love this band but in truth I’ve never quite been convinced by their blending together of technical death metal and hardcore. Live though they’re a different matter, shorn of the sound effects of their albums the songs themselves seem to reveal themselves in a way they never did before. The band pull off some very technical music seemingly with ease and slide between brutality and melody effortlessly. Fans of progressive bands like Between the Buried And Me and Cynic would find an awful lot to like about The Faceless and I hope they manage to capture the more organic feel that their music shows live on album.

After The Faceless’ very enjoyable set it was time for the first of the bands that I’d really wanted to see, German technical/progressive death metallers Obscura who feature in their ranks both past and present members of such luminaries as Pestilence, Necrophagist, Defeated Sanity and Spawn of Possession.

On record Obscura’s technicality can occasionally feel slightly convoluted with so much going on at any one time that it can actually take away from the whole... but, as with The Faceless, everything seems to pull together and just works in the live environment. Merging a fretless bass tone that is rarely heard in death metal circles outside of Death’s Individual Thought Patterns album with some truly inspired guitar work – including some really old school metal guitar runs which inspired plenty of air guitaring - with a genuine aggression that is occasionally lacking in the band’s recorded output make Obscura’s set hugely enjoyable and induces a sea of headbanging to erupt in front of the stage throughout their set.

After Obscura were one of the main reasons that I’d wanted to come to this gig tonight, Sweden’s Necrophobic, a band first formed twenty one years ago who, somewhat surprisingly, were playing their first ever U.K. dates on this tour. From the very start of the set as the band walk onstage dressed in leather, studs and spikes during the atmospheric intro it’s clear that Necrophobic offer something different to any other band on this tour and the influx of people wearing old school thrash shirts and patch jackets to the front of the stage is noticeable. Vocalist Tobias is quite a character onstage, almost constantly in motion and interacting with the crowd, from telling us that they were “here to kill” at the start of opening track Dreams Shall Flesh to an impassioned rant about how he hates downloading and as he buys albums so should everyone else to genuine thanks for coming out to support them he proves himself the consummate frontman. The whole band give a powerful performance, with the speedy blackened thrash riffing producing yet another tsunami of flailing hair in front of the stage and the band seem genuinely surprised at how many people are there not just watching them but who know the majority of their songs too. By the end of their set even people who have never even heard of the band before, let alone actually heard any of their songs were won over and they were the definite highlight of the night for me.

Following Necrophobic’s triumphant performance was always going to be a tough task but Canada’s 3 Inches of Blood were more than up to the task. In some ways 3IOB stood out on this tour even more than Necrophobic since they were the only band to utilise fully “clean” vocals in all of their songs and yet they’re a band who have always managed to have a very wide ranging appeal right across the board of the often disjointed metal scene. The band have actually made a brave move tonight (and I assume for the rest of the tour) by choosing to drop many of their more well known, anthemic songs like Deadly Sinners and Destroy the Orcs and instead play a set of album tracks and the fact that this works goes to show the strength of 3 Inches of Blood’s material and that they shouldn’t be written off, as they have been by some, as a mere novelty act who are taking the piss out of metal. The loss or original co-vocalist Jamie Hooper has actually served to make the band stronger with Cam Pipes showing that not only can he hit the high notes but that he can work a crowd as well as anyone and he’s ably backed up by guitarist Justin Hagberg’s ‘harsh’ vocals which are just that little bit deeper and more powerful than Jamie’s ever were, which suits the band’s music really well. Just in case there’s still some doubters out there, rest assured that 3IOB are the real deal and are as metal as they come and their mixing of traditional heavy metal with a pinch of something a little bit more extreme, with even the occasional blastbeat, gives 3 Inches of Blood a cross-genre appeal that, if there’s any justice in the world, will see them headlining much bigger venues in their own right sooner rather than later.

Finishing the night off was the job of The Black Dahlia Murder, a band who just about everyone seems to describe differently from metalcore, melodic death metal, deathcore and probably a million different other descriptions everyone seems to have an opinion on this band – even those who don’t seem to have ever actually heard them. I must admit upfront that TBDM are a band that have never done an awful lot for me, not out of some sense of musical elitism or anything like that, just that nothing I’ve ever heard by them has ever truly caught my attention... but, as The Faceless and, to a lesser extent, Obscura had already proven to me tonight sometimes a band that doesn’t really grab you with their recorded work can win you over live. Sadly though, despite a display of good musicianship and vocalist Trevor Strnad proving to be a charismatic frontman, while the faithful in front of the stage went reliably mental, I remained unimpressed as the songs just didn’t grab me. As heavy as they undoubtedly were the songs seemed to be lacking either any kind of real hooks or any sense of groove... and it seems that I wasn’t the only one who was bored by them as Rio’s became noticeably emptier as their set went on, which I guess goes to prove that no matter how well you play or how well you perform if the songs aren’t there then there’s always going to be something missing from a performance.

Though I still question the merits of putting quite so many bands on these package tours, particularly when it turns out that several of the bands have had to drop songs (personally I’d prefer to see longer sets by fewer bands anyway) Bonecrusher was a great success and I left Leeds feeling considerably happier and more upbeat than when I arrived, which just goes to show how much positive energy can be gained from enjoying a good metal show with a good crowd who are really into the music.

As I said, I arrived wondering how so many bands would be fitted on in the time, but I left wondering if Bonecrusher would be an annual thing along the lines of Paganfest and just who might be on the bill next time around if it was.

by Neil Woodfin