Bring Me The Horizon
with The Ghost Of A Thousand and Tek One
London Garage, 01.10.10
You would’ve thought that now it’s getting a bit chillier, the notoriously sweaty Garage might prove to be slightly less of a sweatbox. No such luck when a line-up such as tonight’s packs the venue to the rafters with eager bodies. Bring Me The Horizon are bringing their purposely-small-venue UK tour to a close in London tonight. The fact that this band could sell out this venue possibly as many as ten times over makes tonight quite the occasion. The line-up tonight also includes metal’s dubstep darlings Tek-One – complete with hype man and Brighton’s The Ghost of A Thousand.
During Tek-One’s bass-heavy set, I can actually feel my eyelashes vibrating. The wob is overwhelming but enhanced by the live drumming and the rather exuberant hyping up of the crowd. Unsurprisingly, the crowd is most hyped when BMTH’s Oli Sykes appears on stage for a Tek-One remix of one of their tracks. The sweaty affair continues with The Ghost of A Thousand. Some of the assembled crowd seem a little bemused by the rock’n’roll-tinged punk-rock TGOAT bring to the table but the band manage to get the majority of the room moving with their crafty riffs and top-notch drumming skills.
And now to the main event. The evening seems to have passed by pretty quickly so far and Bring Me The Horizon’s set continues that theme. It’s not particularly short in length but its brilliance means it feels short. The only new tracks included in the set – ‘Fuck’ and single ‘It Never Ends’ – from the band’s elaborately-titled third album ‘There Is A Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It, There Is a Heaven Let’s Keep It A Secret’ are received with every bit as much enthusiasm as the anthemic ‘The Comedown’, ‘Football Season Is Over’ and ‘Chelsea Smile’. ‘Fuck’ puts guitarist Jona’s vocal skills to the test with some serious melodies (sung by You Me At Six’s Josh Franceschi on the album) which he carries off with ease. This crowd is just as loud and pick up any lyrics Oli leaves out or points the mic at them for. Most people are pretty much singing / shouting along for the entirety of the set.
With their new album thrown into the mix, Bring Me The Horizon now have a rather large pool of ridiculously good material to pull from in a live setting. This is only going to make for more and more exciting live sets in the future. And it’s not like they were ever a band to be boring in the first place.
Chirps Galore
The hugely anticipated third release from super-producer duo ZZT, ‘ZZafrika‘ sees Zombie Nation and Tiga take their now unmistakable and unrivalled analogue techno sound to the native funk landscape of the motherland.
Pop-punk. Is that a dirty phrase? I’m almost loathed to even use it in this review but it’s kind of difficult to avoid with The Wonder Years. There is a clear leaning towards that world in the band’s music. But the band draw upon the influences associated with pop-punk in the very best possible way. They’ve brought the genre bang up to date with an album that unsurprisingly focuses on the upsides in life. The band members have had some bad luck along the way but they haven’t let this get them down and seem to have channeled all frustrations into one of the feel good albums of the year.