It was a cold, dark, dank evening on Saturday the 17 May when we went to see Swedish metalcore band Soilwork. In the hills, where I live, the clouds were getting ready to settle at ground-level, it was raining continuously, and it was the coldest it’d been all year. It was enough incentive to stay home with a hot cuppa and a good movie, regardless of the bands playing in town; but I managed to resist the couch and the heater and made the trek. On reaching the city I was gratified by weather that was about four degrees warmer.

When we got into Live on Light Square, we were pretty surprised to see the venue quite full. On nights like that one, it’s not unusual for Adelaide metal fans of all persuasions to just stay home rather than brave the elements. The girl at the desk told me that there were more than three hundred and twenty payers: and of those, more than three hundred were pre-sale tickets! That surprised the shit out of me given Adelaide’s penchant for buying tickets at the door.

The first band up, Double Dragon, had been on tour with the remainder of the Soilwork Australian tour, and they were clearly stoked. If you didn’t know they’d been on tour with the headlining act, however, you might have been a bit confused with the repeated comments of frontman Lee Gardiner:
‘Ah it’s good to be back in Adelaide’,
‘Buy us a beer, we’re poor cunts after this week’,
‘We’ve missed you all,’

... like they’d been on a major international tour for more like five months rather than pottering about Australia’s capital cities for about five days.

In fact, that was the most grating thing about DD’s entire set: the way that Gardiner kept going on about having been away, and then kept trying to get ‘in’ with the crowd by addressing the punters like they were in another city: repeated use of the word ‘Adelaide’, for example. It got really, really boring. Man, you live here, you gig here all the time: there’s no need to go on. Additionally, what goes over better with a crowd is not repeated goings-on about having ‘been away’, but stating up-front that ‘we’ve been on tour with Soilwork, they’re awesome, give ‘em all you got, it’s good to be home’, and then leaving the issue the hell alone. Those punters who care will have a chat with you about it later on; but I’m sorry to say mate, your average Joe usually doesn’t give a stuff, especially when you whine like a little girl about being away for less than a week. It’s also not very metal.

So anyway, back to the action. The beauty of the venue was that for the first time I actually got to hear the fullness of Double Dragon’s sound. Every time I’ve heard them in the recent past, it’s been at Fowler’s, where the sound is frequently half-way to good, and very rarely is it great. Double Dragon band keeps improving, and every time that I see them they’re a little tighter, a little more comfortable in front of a crowd, a little less self-conscious. Losing the self-consciousness is a good thing: it makes the performance more fluid, the crowd interaction less contrived, the music smoother and better-executed. They’ve still got a way to go (imitating the headlining act’s style of crowd interaction wasn’t the greatest thing Double Dragon could’ve done) but they’re getting there. The result was an interested crowd – most of whom stayed to at least watch the set – a well-paced set, and a good intro to the headlining band.

If you are a Swedish metal fan, you could be forgiven for thinking that the country only breeds unbelievably good, extreme metal: bands like Nasum, Amon Amarth, Dismember, Arch Enemy, (among others). However, Sweden also has a plethora of hardcore and metalcore bands too: and Soilwork is one of these.

Soilwork were billed to start at 10.30 pm, and they were only about ten minutes late in getting started. Just before the band took the stage there was a voice-over announcement. This voiceover stated that Soilwork are from a country where ‘the men are men and the women are men’, that they play Viking metal (which they don’t: Viking metal is a band like Amon Amarth), and so on. Apparently this band, in its early days, was a melodic death band with overtones of the distinctively classic Gothenburg metal sound. Well, they sure as hell aren’t that any more. What Soilwork played was metalcore that could have come from absolutely anywhere in the world, but was more American than anything else.

The band was last in Australia four years ago, and went to great pains to tell the crowd how happy they were to be back. The punters were clearly happy, too: all three-hundred-and-something crowded themselves into the venue right in front of the stage. The active mosh was at least six rows of people deep, and stretched from one side of the stage to the other. Everyone else was nodding, dancing, or grooving along on their own around the edges of the crowd.

One great drawback for me was that the P.A. clearly couldn’t handle the sound. Every time the bass drum thumped, the vocals dipped; and when the band started to get remotely heavy, the sound was strobed, with patches of sound missing. It was really disappointing, and once I noticed it, I kept on noticing it. Still, it seems that out of the two venues, Fowler’s and Liveonlightsquare, the latter is at least keeping up with a bit more of a balanced sound, even if the system can’t handle everything at once.

Soilwork played a set that kept all of the punters happy. Their set list encompassed most of their releases, from 1998’s Steelbath Suicide, through 2001’s Predator’s Portrait, 2002’s Natural Born Chaos, and right up to last year’s Sworn to a Great Divide.

The punters at this show were absolute putty in Speed Strid’s hands. He had ‘em yelling, jumping, moshing. He didn’t get a circle pit happening, but not for want of trying; I suspect that the crowd were all a bit too young (in fact most of the crowd didn’t look like metalheads at all), and they weren’t into the whole circle pit thing. I truly believe that if Strid had told the crowd to turn around and stab each other to the death, that they would have done it! They were hooked, drooling almost. It was all brilliant for a good-vibe, focused set and it probably made the band’s performance just that little bit better.

Towards the end of the show, just before the last encore for the night, Strid turned around and said, ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t take four years for us to come back. We love it here. Honestly, we really do. We fucking love it here.’

Well, man, you’ve got a dedicated core of fans: and they’d all love it if you came back.