Machine Head, Hatebreed,Bleeding Through, Emmure @Festival Hall, Melbourne(25/03/2010)

Mon 29th Mar, 2010 in Gig Reviews

Check out some amazing photos from Festival Hall here

Making your way along Spencer Street in Melbourne on the 25th of March, you don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out what’s going on at Festival Hall this particular Thursday night. There’s more than a few t-shirts emblazoned with the unforgettable slogan “Machine Fucking Head”, skin-heads and tattoos as far as the eye can see; one punter fully decked out in Glenn Danzig style make-up and garb. There must be a metal gig on tonight. And not just any metal-gig, only the aforementioned Machine Head – finally headlining their own tour and not embarrassingly playing second fiddle to the likes of Slipknot. This is the Black Procession Tour.

With what was perhaps the heaviest line-up Festival Hall has featured for quite some time and, not coincidently, the most brutal circle-pit I have seen for quite some time, baby faced hard-core band Emmure kicked off the night’s proceeding’s with a short and sharp set-list. The small crowd that had bothered turning up early enough to this five-hour-plus event were put through their paces by a young band who are clearly more than a little bit influenced by Sepultura. Whilst this is not necessary a bad thing, Emmure left a little bit to be desired in the originality stakes, although their set was energetic and enthusiastic, providing a suitable warm-up to what was to come.

Bleeding Through were next up; a band who perhaps won more fans through the appeal of keyboardist Marta Peterson than their sound. The focus of the mostly audience was directed towards Peterson during the entire set; her aggressive pounding of the keys and headbanging proving difficult to draw away from.

The rest of the band, unfortunately, could not quite match her energy. If there isn’t already a sub-genre for it, Bleeding Through is what I would call post-nu-metal. While undoubtedly talented musicians, their sound seems quite familiar, like you’ve heard it all before, and their almost choreographed stage moves seemed a little contrived. Don’t get me wrong, Bleeding Through were interesting to watch and hear live, however their set didn’t compel me to rush out and buy their latest LP. Their sound could well have been affected by the fact they were missing a guitarist also, which might explain why they sounded somewhat one-dimensional.

You could have sworn that there was some wager agreed to by the bands backstage as to who could get the biggest and most violent circle pit happening, with the front-men from each band trying to incite the crowd into opening it up from each side of the room. And what would a metal gig be without the obligatory punch-up? From our vantage point we notice during Bleeding Through’s circle-pit some poor fool receiving a savage beating, and such was the severity of it – witnesses were left assuming he must have had it coming.

Finally we got to the business end of the gig, as Hatebreed – a band that have been around for well over a decade and continue to be well respected by their peers – took to the stage to impart their chugging riffs and positively-affirming lyrics. In fact, Hatebreed are a band of many contrasts, at times sounding preachy, and other times just sounding damn angry. Songs such as I Will Be Heard and This Is Now lecture the importance of being yourself and looking at the positives in life, whereas others such as Destroy Everything just demand their fans “fuck shit up”.

Front-man Jamey Jasta, looking every bit like Mike Muir of Suicidal Tendancies, bounded around the stage like a man possessed as his band mates ripped through a setlist packed with many crowd favourites. This was also a chance for Aussie fans to see original guitarist Wayne Lozniak returning to the fold, and the band locked in as though he’d never left. Hatebreed seemed genuinely stoked to be on a bill of such heavy proportions, and they certainly didn’t disappoint their many fans.

Machine Head have a reputation for being sloppy drunks onstage, and I can definitely vouch for this the couple of other times I have seen them (Halloween a few years ago springs to mind) but tonight there was no sign of this at all. In fact they were as tight as I’ve ever heard them, and they locked into a setlist spanning their impressively long career Although this gig was still technically part of their Blackening tour, they changed it up and featured songs from all of their 6 full-length albums. Ten-Ton Hammer from The More Things Change, and material from the Through The Ashes Of Empires LP were perhaps the most well received.

Any Machine Head fan knows that drummer Dave McAin is an absolute weapon. With his snare slapping and double-kicking resonating through Festival Hall like machine-gun fire, he is undoubtedly one of the best drummers doing the circuit at the moment, and he was in fine form on the night.

This tour was the wrap-up to a three year journey for Rob Flynn and his boys to promote The Blackening – an album which was recently voted the best album of the decade by Metal Hammer magazine – and they did not take a backward step, particularly during offerings from this brutal album. Machine Head were having fun, even if it wasn’t their usual drink-bingeing kind of fun, so much so that Flynn likened it to “orgasming all over the (Festival Hall) crowd”.