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Tennessee deathcore band Whitechapel are, perhaps surprisingly to some, a very young band: they’ve been around for just over two years. In that time they’ve come an enormously long way: from complete obscurity, to signing with a major label (*Metal Blade*), and international success. For them to hit Australia with a two-year history, and to hit regional centres as well as the capital cities, is something just short of incredible. At their Adelaide show on Thursday January 15, at Fowler’s, I think the amazement of their situation had still hardly started to sink in: at least, that’s the impression I got from what frontman Phil Bozeman was saying throughout their set.

As usual, I missed the first band, local technical death metal act Asphyxia: sorry fellas! At least this time it wasn’t entirely my fault – the notification I got from the promoter had the door time listed as 8 pm. In fact, Asphyxia took the stage at 7.45, so that by the time I turned up at about twenty-past, they had already done their thing and moved on. Next time, eh?

Dyscord were next up, much to the delight of Adelaide’s punters, many of whom seem to have taken a bit of a liking to the West Australian lads. I much prefer to see Dyscord live than to listen to them recorded, and the reason for that is because they are heavier on stage and seem to put more of themselves into the music. The last time I’d seen these guys I made a similar comment, but whether it was the effect of having done eleven shows in ten days with a couple of world-class bands, and having the ability to hone their show each time, or something else entirely, they played a much tighter and heavier set than their last appearance here.

The punters really got into the Dyscord set, and this came from the effort that the band put into its show. There was a huge amount of energy on stage, and the crowd picked up on it and gave back what they received. It’s not a myth that energetic bands create energetic crowds, especially if the band is working the audience at the same time—and this set proved it.

I’m not a fan of much of the clean vocals that front man James Herbert gives us. It’s great he gives it a go, but I hate to tell ya man, you’re often flat. And when the punters are getting into the heavier side of Dyscord, the clean vocals get them off-side pretty quickly, and you can literally see the crowd’s interest diminishing in front of you.

After a relatively short break—this gig finished well before midnight, meaning short sets and short breaks—Tasmania’s Psycroptic hit the stage.

Having seen Psycroptic at so many shows in the last few months, I must admit that I had become a little bit jaded with them; as you tend to with bands you see very often in a fairly short space of time. I wasn’t alone: many others who turned out to this show seemed to be in the same spot.

Psycroptic are a great band, and as I watched them I reflected on how far they’d come since 2001’s Isle of Disenchantment. They play a finely tuned, tight set; the samples they play between songs are well placed, and the music is often — like tonight — faultless.

Yet I couldn’t help getting a sense of band boredom. The punters didn’t react with glee, like many did with Dyscord, and this kind of went both ways between the band and the crowd. Having said that, I must admit that I got the feeling that the circle pits that vocalist Peppiatt tends to encourage did a lot to disperse the crowd’s enthusiasm. With a different crowd it may not have; but this crowd, made up of a lot of youngsters, became instantly wary.

What happens with a circle pit at Fowler’s is that there are maybe four or five protagonists who make everything unpleasant for everybody else. Result? The punters watch the circle pit, so as to avoid getting injured, instead of the band—thereby disintegrating not just the gathering at front-and-centre, but the entire vibe of the audience in the venue.

Psycroptic played a good set, with tracks from their latest release (Ob)Servant, plus some from previous releases, but it was far from the best I’ve seen from them. That was on their album promotion tour late last year, which was just killer. These guys are heading overseas for a huge tour in Europe (with The Black Dahlia Murder, Cephalic Carnage and Sylosis) very soon, meaning we won’t see them on our stages again for quite some time.

When Whitechapel ’s set kicked off, the metalcore fans in the crowd started their usual circle pit “dance”, throwing arms and legs and elbows violently around and being generally antisocial. I realise that’s an enormous value-judgement on my behalf: bear with me on this. I dislike it because it ruins the experience of seeing major acts for so many people who go to shows. The Whitechapel show was a case in point: they’d got maybe one song into the set, when a near-altercation broke out because one of these fans had whacked somebody in the face by doing this—and there was agitation from other fans present to get the person responsible removed from the venue.

In the interim, Whitechapel looked a little bit lost, with vocalist Bozeman even asking the question, – œIs everybody paying attention?’ And, when realising a chunk of people weren’t, he commented, – œthose guys aren’t’; indicating the cluster where the altercation was in the process of breaking out. After this, the punters who liked to throw their elbows violently around the place seemed to check themselves occasionally, resulting in a much more relaxed vibe all round.

Although Whitechapel are slated as brutal death metal/deathcore, they actually played a set that was far more death than it was – œcore: something that went down really well with most of the punters, young and old.

Despite the band’s youth, they play a tight set, and give every bit of themselves for the length of the entire set, leaving them looking nearly empty by the end. Knowing that they’d played so many shows in such a short time—with a great deal of driving time in between—and that the vocalist had been sick for the past week and a half, made their performance even more impressive. It was energetic, excited, full-on and brutal: and it made a huge impact on the crowd. Additionally, the fact that Whitechapel has three guitarists made for a really fat sound; and seeing three guitarists, a bassist and a vocalist all banging their heads in unison was simply awesome.

The excitement that Whitechapel had for being in Australia was incredibly evident in Bozeman’s oft-repeated comments thanking everybody for their time to see them, and how they never thought they would get out here. The thing that struck me the most, however, was the fact that he encouraged everybody to buy the supporting acts’ merch rather than their own—support of the local scene isn’t something one sees to that extent in an international act.

Whitechapel literally has only two full-length releases out ( The Somatic Defilement from 2007, and last year’s This is Exile), and they played material from both. Unfortunately, the set was really very short (it felt like less than an hour). After persistent yelling for an encore, Whitechapel played just one more song, Bozeman honestly telling us that he wasn’t sure how much longer his voice would last.

In many ways, you couldn’t get a better way to kick off what is sure to be a killer year for metal in Australia. I was excited before I got there, and still on that excited high when I left: something that only happens when you’ve gotten out there and been to a show that really hit the right spot.

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