The Danes receive a hero’s welcome as they enter one-by-one, with drummer Jon Larsen making the ascent up his mountain of a drum riser to a rapturous response. It’s minutes before they hit the stage, yet the entire sold out room erupts like a choir at a mass to howl the words of AC/DC’s Highway To Hell as it roars out the venue’s PA system. VOLBEAT on the other hand, have no trouble firing up a frenzy from the front to the back. Rating: 5/10 Volbeat live O2 Academy Islington, London. But everything seems to fall flat for the band this evening, with much of the crowd keeping their feet on the ground and their head banging to a bare-minimum bob.Ĭlock watching isn’t common at good gigs, but there’s more than a few phones being checked by confused faces as they wrap up their set and shuffle off stage. It says a lot that there’s more facing the bar than there is the stage during any given song, and it’s painful to think that a song as crushingly good as They Must Die Screaming doesn’t even get a pit to write home about.
Benediction live O2 Academy Islington, London. Frontman Dave Ingram does his best at self-deprecating stand-up between songs – “ this one is about a car crash, which this could end up being!” – but it’s only long-serving guitarist Darren Brookes who ever looks like he’s actually having fun up there.
It’s not that BENEDICTION’s death metal for dummies is bad if you were served them as meal, you wouldn’t grumble – you just wouldn’t gush about it either. But save for a handful of fans, there’s few here who’ve forsaken the bars across the road at 6pm on a Saturday to see death metal stalwarts BENEDICTION – the blank faces do more than enough to show they’re here for one band, and one band only.
Piling into the venue like sardines in a tin, it’s either swim to the front on the shoulders of giants or shimmy like you’re 2D platforming your way through this level of madness. But it’s been three years since VOLBEAT bought their rockabilly circus to our shores, so a sweaty club show is the perfect way to shake off any ring rust before a summer of festivals, including Download Festival. “Why is a European festival headliner doing club shows in Islington?” echoes around the London Borough as a centipede of a queue wraps around the O2 Academy Islington.
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