It’s a night of premier league hardcore, and hooded tops, tattoos and body piercing abound. Boston’s Unearth have tendencies towards the metalcore end of the spectrum, and have a bandana wearing bassist to prove it. Thus their brute metal features regular infusions of widdly guitar bits shredded out by guitarists with big sideburns. It’s powerful and technically impressive but can’t shake the feeling of being a little generic.
Connecticut maestros Hatebreed have little prove, despite the recent uncertainties within the band camp, all of which are trampled immediately they take the stage. There’s little in the way of showbiz flash – four tattooed blokes in baseball caps and drummer who can barely be glimpsed behind the wall of cymbals and dry ice – but by Beelzebub they conjure up a truly fearsome spectacle. Veins bulge, testosterone flows but it’s also tremendous fun.
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Like some berserk self-improvement seminar being conducted in the middle of the opening battle scene in Gladiator, Jamey Jasta bellows out a succession of yellalong song titles which the audience, between flying about amid a pulverising wall of bodies and fists, scream back. It’s a rock show as an animalistic ritual, and one that shouldn’t be - and indeed isn’t - overstayed. The crowd energy levels are beginning to show inevitable sings of dipping after an hour when, after the concluding This Is Now, the lights come on – no encore – and that’s it. People troop out, sporting bruises, black eyes, grinning stupidly. Hatebreed still rule.
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