By any standards this is an impressive double bill – ARCH ENEMY are riding high on their wave of photogenic melodic death metal, and the last time Canada’s metal deities STRAPPING YOUNG LAD were here, two years ago, they sold the same venue out on their own.
Openers THROWDOWN get things simmering mildly with a by-the-book display of macho brute metal, although how desperately the world needs another slim variation on Hatebreed is unclear, and the most animated the crowd get is when the band cover Pantera’s A New Level.
Up next it’s SYL, and without further ado they proceed to peel the top off everybody’s skulls and insert a food blender (in, of course, a good way) – it’s quite simply the most brain-shaftingly intense slab of Herculean metal you’ll ever likely see. Frontman Devin Townsend may resemble a demented scientist in a Marx Brothers movie, but by Valhalla he can rock. Blasted along by the mountainous Gene Hoglan, who swats contemptuously at his drum kit in the manner of Zeus cuffing away troublesome mortals, you could hear the sound of jaws dropping across the sold-out hall, if only every decibel in the hall wasn’t already consumed with the gargantuan wall of noise.
Burly bassist Byron Stroud, hirsute guitarist Jed Simon and the manic Townsend flail in thrall to the brutal rhythms – this is a band that seriously look like they mean it – and even Townsend’s between-song banter takes things up another level from the usual clichéd rock nonsense - “Let me hear your death metal growls!” he orders. “Let me hear your black metal screams! Let me hear you recite Fermat’s Last Theorem!”
With latest album Alien to promote there’s no room for cherished oldies like Detox or Aftermath, but these are mere quibbles.
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“We are Strapping Young Lad!” roars Townsend as the band take their bows. “You are fucking not!”, and how right he is. A sweat-soaked black-clad young fellow staggers past me to recover at the bar, screaming “metal-l-l-l-l-!!” as he goes. Hell, yes.
It takes balls to follow that, and while ARCH ENEMY’s Angela Gossow may not possess them in the strict biological sense, she is certainly has them in metal terms. Appearing amid an ocean of retina-scorching blue light, the singer and her male cohorts thunder into Nemesis, one of the very best rock songs to have been released in 2005. It’s a promising start, and they proceed to pull out every trick in the book, including some we might have preferred left alone – not one but two guitar solos, a drum solo and a heroically sustained hour-long demonstration of hair twirling and general posing by bassist Sharlee D’Angelo.
But while they are certainly very good, SYL had been cosmically superlative, and there’s an inescapable feel of the anti-climactic about the headliner’s set. Full marks for ambition and value for money, but the lesson which has been spelt out clearly in letters of fire tonight is: Do not ever try to follow Strapping Young Lad.
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