Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Nina Grad
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: 20.10.2012
Attendance: 170
Ticket price: €15.00 / €18.00
Bleed From Within are Scottish metalcore troublemakers who are a well-known, firmly planted name over here, having already played Slovenia twice. This time the guys kicked off an autumn European tour as headliners, bringing along English openers Bury Tomorrow and the intriguing Japanese industrial metalcore screamers Crossfaith.
Orto bar! It’s nine o’clock! In the evening, of course! The place is buzzing. Young fans of hard-edged extreme music everywhere. The program ran fast! Squeezing three bands through in three hours is no easy feat! Orto bar has to be quiet until midnight, or the windows start singing! Crossfaith, a Japanese quintet, surprised absolutely everyone in the club. Wildly energetic, uncompromising and full of confidence! That’s how their set felt. What sets Crossfaith apart is the programming, which embodies the most polished techno beat patterns and software sound loops, and even dips into the primitive sounds of the first PC computers. This »dancing« sits in a leveled-out soundscape with wound-up guitar riffing. The band opened with a canned intro from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which flowed into the song »Monolith«. Among the songs on the set list was also Jägerbomb; I didn’t manage to catch the rest of the repertoire. A quintet that goes berserk on stage with no brakes! It was great fun watching the packed club merge into one, jumping in unison at the commands of the screaming, potent singer Koie Kenta. Towards the end of the set the band even surprised with a cover of the Prodigy song Omen, which they naturally dressed up in their own musical idiom. Charming and convincing all the way. In short, Crossfaith, who released their second full-length studio album »The Dream, The Space« last year, announced that tonight Orto bar would see no survivors.
It was a funny sight, because by the time Bury Tomorrow took the stage, the club looked noticeably empty. It was only really packed up by the monitors, which, as always, pushed past the edge of Orto bar’s miniature stage. The melodic metalcore quintet couldn’t care less. They hit hard from every angle and fired off all the ammo they had in the 40 minutes available. This is a band that’s no joke, having released their second studio album »The Union Of Crowns« this year, and on the well-established German label Nuclear Blast. Amid the unbridled aggression the quintet unleashed and the excellent stage execution of the material, the club filled up decently, which of course logically escalated into a few group mosh and circle pits, while towards the end singer Daniel Winter-Bates rather unluckily tried to climb onto the crowd for a bit of surfing, and nearly tumbled off the stage in the attempt. Evidently the density of the crowd was a bit too low, or too weak. Honorable Rain, Royal Blood, You And I, Anythig With Teeth, Waxed Wings, Lionheart and Redeemer were among the songs the band played that night. The band also had some sound trouble: the bass farmed out a few honestly thunderous farts and bulged ungratefully thick in the mix, but above all the guitars didn’t sound good, damn muffled and buzzing in a smeared mess.
The headliners didn’t manage to string together more than 40 minutes. Still, they were the most anticipated band of the night, which the crowd confirmed by packing into the club. The Scots of Bleed From Within, in a short but furious set that swept, aired out and scorched the pipes of everyone present, leaving heads flashing and blood trickling from nostrils and down earlobes, opened with the freshly released single It Lives In Me, then walked through material from the albums »Empire« (2010) and »Humanity«(2009)! Up to that night, the band delivered the technically best-played show. Their brand of metalcore doesn’t overdo the »breakdowns« either; they’re balanced very well with melodically cut harmonies and passages that add a touch more complexity to the band’s character. Scott Kennedy, who linked the songs together wittily in the breaks, and whose addresses to the crowd were graced by that famous Scottish dialect, was also considerably more successful at »crowd surfing« than Bury Tomorrow’s Daniel Winter-Bates before him. This fleshy, bleeding mix of extreme brutality and sonic terror conquered Orto bar with a successful maneuver and fully satisfied a good 150 heated heads, who freely offered themselves up to the uncompromising penetration of a crumbling hellish atmosphere that unstoppably rained down cluster bombs of napalm. Some of the biggest fans knew the verses so well that vocalist Scott occasionally handed the chorus screaming over to individuals in the audience, further cementing the excellent energy bridge running between crowd and band. You can tell the band is well oiled on stage and plays a lot of shows. 40 minutes! The end! The sound was very, very good!
The metalcore party in the Slovenian capital thus booked another fully successful concert, tailor-made for all the hard-headed music nuts. Metalcore is obviously more than red-hot in Slovenia right now, so we can expect even more of these head-ripping concert projectiles in the future, leaving total devastation in their wake!
Setlist
BLEED FROM WITHIN:
1. It Lives In Me
2. Last Of Our Kind
3. The Novelist
4. Dishonour
5. This Is Our Legacy
6. Up Rising
7. The Healing
8. Servants Of Divinity
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