“Sink while you bathe in hallucination.“
All photography by Maisie Cooper, taken at the O2 Academy in Birmingham – contact Maisie prior to any use. Words by Anton Smeeton from Alexandria Palace, London.
Humanity’s Last Breath
Opening a bill as strong as tonight’s can be an intimidating prospect, one that Humanity’s Last Breath meet immediately with a devastating onslaught of down-tuned riffs, fierce guttural vocals and pitch-shifted dissonance. Unfortunately, their densely packed polyrhythms begin to get lost in a bad mix and songs become blurred together in a way that doesn’t do justice to the conviction and energy they bring to their performance. Thankfully water-tight percussion from fill-in drummer Zach Dean keeps enough structure in place to prevent riffs from completely disappearing into a wall of sound that threatened to envelop them. With enough fans in the room to get necks loose and early pits opened they push through and get the crowd suitably warmed up for the rest of the night.
Shadow of Intent
Shadow of Intent front-man Ben Duerr has perhaps the toughest job of the evening, knowing you’re going to be followed by two of the scene’s most talented bands with vocalists at the absolute apex of technical ability is no easy task. Pinned to the centre of the stage by sheer exertion, he commits to a vocal range that somehow manages to meet and exceed the polish of their studio performances. His frankly stunning resonance is supported perfectly by the band’s richly melodic take on modern deathcore. While it feels strange to label takes from last year’s full-length Imperium Delerium as catchy, the breakdowns and symphonic elements of songs like “Flying The Black Flag” or “Mechanical Chaos” are undeniably infectious and impossible to avoid headbanging along to. Constantly inciting the crowd to greater antics it’s undeniable Shadow of Intent have the presence to own venues like tonight’s in their own right.
Whitechapel
Deathcore discourse has always been divided and fiercely debated, but one thing it seems almost everyone can agree on is that Whitechapel may just be the best to ever do it. Elder statesmen of the scene whose influence was crucial in paving the way for everything that followed, they make a fitting choice for main support tonight. Frontman Phil Boseman‘s much beloved guttural vocals reverberate through the floor. Ripping through cuts from their latest full length, Hymns In Dissonance, they whip the crowd into a frenzy even before they launch into a stream of classics from deathcore’s breakout years. Songs from cornerstone albums This Is Exile and The Somatic Defilement simply refuse to show their age, sounding fresher than ever in one of biggest rooms they’ve yet to be played in. It’s this heirloom setting that makes their pedigree profoundly obvious, effortlessly filling a massive room with an equally massive sound.
Lorna Shore
For as long as deathcore has had a name it’s had its detractors. Accusations of generic, derivative songwriting; cries of being too macho or too effeminate; too edgy, too commercial; and perhaps the hardest to believe today being that the scene as a whole was simply a trend that was going to die out very, very quickly. Lorna Shore challenge every criticism levelled against the genre as a whole with a near unparalleled technical performance, pairing orchestral flourish and touches of melody with relentless heaviness. Their live show is explosive – massive pyrotechnics launch spears of flame over the heads of the front rows. Columns of lights, bursts of smoke and a massive backdrop screen frame a band straddling the peak of their career with total confidence.
Frontman Will Ramos‘ vocal gymnastics have been the linchpin to Lorna Shore’s surging popularity, and they take pride of place tonight – crystal clear production allows his now infamous animal growls and screeches to dominate the room. He exerts total control over a crowd who are only too happy to launch a tidal wave of crowd surfers back in appreciation, obliging Ramos‘ demands for bigger and bigger walls of death with desperate enthusiasm. Lorna Shore seem dedicated to matching the energy of the audience with an enthusiasm of their own that propels them through a set that seems to fly past. The venue is a furnace by the time the show is crowned with their iconic signature “To the Hellfire“, and with that, the audience is utterly spent. There’s no wonder how Lorna Shore have managed to fight their way to the peak of the genre.
It’s safe to say nobody in the early days of the scene could have predicted that deathcore would last this long or reach the levels of popularity and relevance it currently enjoys. And while it’s critics certainly haven’t disappeared, it’s in bands like Lorna Shore that we can be certain that it will only continue to defy expectations.
