Better late then never?
So first up (in my world at least) were melodic hardcore upstarts Create to Inspire. I had already listened to their EP Halfway Home quite a few times as it's honestly just a really good EP and the artwork is among the best this year. In short: They did not, in any way, disappoint.
The performance did not suffer from this energetic "stage" presence and vocalist Sean Midson stood out as a particular highlight of the entire night. If you're not familiar with CTI's music Sean goes from hardcore shouts and screams to pitch screaming/shouting to singing within most songs but while I've seen many bands falter in bringing all those elements to the table Sean brought his A-game and truly blew me away.
The instrumental side was no disappointment either, the band was tight and brought the material to life with the aforementioned energy and a confident performance overall.
Halfway Home is available for a price of your naming on Bandcamp and I'm hoping many people name a high price so we can get more CTI sooner rather than later. Definitely one of the best EP's of the year.
They played through several songs from Bad Weather and I'm pretty sure they played a song from their upcoming album, announced shortly after the festival. When they played The Fox and The Crow was the highlight of their set for me and their mathcore intensity is really something worth seeing live so if they're playing somewhere near you soon, don't miss out on it.
Also worth noting: Palm Reader had the best merch of all the bands. Both Þyri and I bought really cool shirts from them and I was lucky enough that my shirt was (only) available in small.
THE HELL were kind enough to rectify my former geographical misunderstanding and let me know I was in fact not in Bournemouth but Brighton, that's what you did for me THE HELL, you dicks...
They launched right into song after song from their two albums with minimal banter in between songs until Black Mist (who I interviewed here) had a problem with his Axe FX despite "downloading all of Slipknot's settings" on to it. Despite the technical difficulty an impromptu love song to an audience member proved enough to keep the mood, and the inflatable dick they brought with them, up.
Overall it was a hell of a lot of fun (see what I did there?) and although, as the song goes, "everybody dies", everybody was well alive during the set.
For those of you who haven't fed the rhino already I recommend checking them out on record and, once you've learned some lyrics, show up for a live show to sing along. The band was in top form both energetically and performance-wise, which is starting to appear as an ongoing theme, it truly was an excellent show all round.
Playing selections from their three albums they had the crowd in their hands from the first note to the last. Behind them was a flag depicting the artwork for their latest album, The Sorrow and the Sound which, along with Create to Inspire's Halfway Home, is definitely a candidate for best artwork of 2014.
As with all the other bands there was a certain closeness felt as band members entered the crowd and vocalist Lee Tobin even made his presence better known when the night's only trouble broke out. Without going into detail a non-moshing audience member up front got pissed at a moshing audience member and was ready to pounce when Lee stepped between them. He said that they were there to have fun together and if that wasn't going to work, they could just as well fuck off and stop the show so that was an incredibly cool thing to do.
My personal high point for their show was the massive sing-a-long that Tides brought along so I'll leave that song below for all of you to learn before seeing Feed The Rhino live in a town near you.
One last thing, we met a man claiming to be a viking who was really nice and I promised to give him a shout-out in here. His name is Fraser, Fraiser or, if he's a sci-fi viking (Sci-fiking?) possibly Phrazer, and he has a great mustache. If you see him at a show just go dance with him, mosh a little or say hi from he. He's a nice dude.
Jón Þór