Periphery, Tesseract, AsSilence Breaks @ TheAnnandale, Sydney (30/07/11)

Mon 1st Aug, 2011 in Gig Reviews

First in the line up was a local NSW band, As Silence Breaks, who have been in the Sydney metal scene for many years now and are one of the most experienced local bands around. Their set consisted of about 40 minutes worth of songs packed with breakdowns and huge bass drops that made the whole venue shake with the heaviest songs of the night.

After a very brief break, Tesseract were ready to take the stage. The progressive metal band all the way from the UK are renowned for their crisp clean guitars, interesting timing and polyrhythmic motifs and amazing clean vocals. The band played with extreme precision without making it seem as if they were complex songs, they just grooved. Unlike the opening band Tesseract used a lot of clean vocals and clean guitar tones. Percussionist Jay Postones played absolutely perfectly maintaining a constant groove. The bass player also maintained a perfect groove, incorporating slap bass into metal is something that is rarely seen let alone executed as well as Amos Williams did. Williams, as in the original recordings, made use of complex polyrhythms to coincide with the percussionist. He played all of this keeping composure and a great stage presence without making it seem as if he was even trying.

The two guitarists, Acle Kahney and James Monteith executed their parts perfectly with huge amounts of reverb crispness clear while dealing with some intense overdriven sounds. The highlights of the evening was supplied Dan Tompkins’ vocals, which were absolutely amazing, pitch perfect, singing his lungs out with more intensity than one could imagine. An epic amount of reverb was added to the mix which can ruin everything as soon as one thing is sung out of tune, this was not an issue at all however. The crowd interaction was quite amazing too and it would have been hard to spot someone who was not banging their head.

Periphery, the headlining band, the band most people were there to see. They took a while to be set up and the crowd was becoming somewhat impatient as they eagerly awaited the whole band to hit the stage. The set consisted of most of the songs of their self titled album along with some newer tracks. Three guitarists, a vocalist, a bass player and a percussionist shared the same stage in attempt to keep in perfect time with each other, this attempt was successful even though one of the members was just a fill in.

Matt Halpern sat on his drum stool in front of a kit that seemed tiny in front of him ready to rip up a set and prove to everyone that he was the king of groove on the drums. He succeeded. Halpern played incredibly incorporating a fair bit of improvisation while still keeping a solid pulse for the rest of the band to follow. The bassist, Tom Murphy, followed Halpern perfectly supporting the low end of Periphery while the three guitarists played a mix of unabated rhythms and melodic lines. The fill in guitarist, Mark Holcomb, played impeccably considering he is not a permanent member of the band.

Misha Mansoor, a highly respected figure in the “Djent” community played incredibly and managed to have an amazing tone in such a small venue with little time for soundchecks. He came across as more of a comic character as he was playing even though he was playing everything spot on. Spencer Sotelo was incredible even though it was clear that there were some issues with the monitoring. He still managed to sing in pitch without actually being able to hear himself, long soaring screams mixed with some high pitched vocals were executed exactly like, if not better than the original recordings.

Overall the two international bands showed that they are two of the leading progressive metal bands of today being able to play their technical music with amazing precision bringing an enormous sounding show anywhere in the world.