BONDED BY BLOOD, CAULDRON AND HALLOWED POINT
LEEDS JOSEPHS WELL – 11/05/09
Well they say folks don’t get much tighter than in Yorkshire, and even the measly £4 entry (that’s half the usual door price!) wasn’t enough to entice anywhere near the kind of crowd seen at last months Evile show. Still, can’t entirely blame them as not only was this one of those dreaded school-night gigs, but also incredibly poorly promoted partly due to this been taken over by another promoter at the last minute after originally being billed at Rios. Tonight things aren’t running to schedule and it’s the wrong side of 9PM by the time Hallowed Point hit the stage. After a sloppy performance a couple of weeks prior at Full Thrash Assault, I had my apprehensions but after a couple of songs tonight it seems they have succeeded to ‘Fight The Curse’ and deliver a fine set. In contrast to their FTA performance, songs like ‘Indestructible’ and the new ‘Path Of Vengeance’ come off effortlessly, with the musicians appearing to enjoy themselves on stage, and their technical power-thrash style gets the crowd in the mood for what’s to follow.
It seems now that Earache have exhausted the NWOThrashM genre, they have delved further back into the metal vault and begun reviving the trad metal sounds of yesteryear as it’s all mullets and bullet belts as Cauldron proceed to rock the stadium. Sadly, this is a style that has always failed to gel with me and this performance doesn’t change my opinion. So saccharine are the vocals of Jason Decay that I can feel the cavities building up in my teeth just listening! There are enough Priest and Diamond Head-isms to make me feel as though we’ve been thrown back into an age when metal was metal and men wore spandex and used enough hairspray to put a hole in the ozone layer; they give all the appropriate crotch-thrusting, lip-pouting, fist pounding metal shapes to back it up an’ all! Sure, I can’t resist banging my head to the rollicking ‘Chained Up In Chains’ with its catchy melody and ‘Conjure The Mass’ has some real hard and heavy riffage, but after three or four songs this all starts to seem a little tired, and I decide that the bar is ultimately more interesting. Whatever spell they were brewing in this cauldron, it hasn’t worked on me.
My watch is lingering ominously around the 11 mark by the time Bonded By Blood are set to thrash, and with an exam first thing next morning my time before dashing for the last train home is extremely limited. It’s a good few months since I saw this lot last time they were over and tonight they have that same spark they had then. The politely observant crowd soon surged forward and did what good thrash gigs are famous for, i.e. form a pit, and even I couldn’t stay away. These guys seem to be ablaze tonight, raging through the likes of ‘Mind Pollution’ and ‘Civil Servant’ which is tighter than an MP required to spend his own money. They have that raw energy and seem to feed both off one another and the crowd and there’s a real intimacy as the dudes are huddled together on the minute stage interacting with the maniacs in the pit! The riffs are sharp, drumming is fierce and Aladdin spits the mic with genuine aggression. These Mexican-Americans have succeeded in bringing ‘Another Disease’ to our land, only rather than Swine Flu this is the disease of thrash, and it’s just as contagious. So busy was I in devouring a remedy in the encore of ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ (Well it had to be, didn’t it?) that I lost all sense of time and the train went and left without me. Cough, splutter. Oh Well. Quarantine tomorrow.
Luci Herbert
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