exploremusic

Let’s continue with the second half of my heavy Canadian Music Week experience.

Saturday March 13, 2010

For my third night of CMW I found myself back at the Annex Wreckroom for a show headlined by Israel’s prog-metal sensation Orphaned Land. The night started with some raucous folk-metal from Battlesoul who call both London and Goderich, Ontario home. Unlike some of their contemporaries, Battlesoul manage to add a bit of flavour to the generic folk-metal sound through catchy thrash riffing and Celtic melodies, which had the headbangers up front going right from the first song.

Up next was Toronto’s Will of The Ancients, a long-running melodic black metal group. WOTA (as they’re known in Toronto) have shuffled their lineup quite a bit over the past six years since the release of their first demo. The group is fronted by former bassist Steve Walton, who took over vocal duties about two years ago. Walton did a good job of exciting a crowd that was split between people who had seen WOTA countless times before, and Orphaned Land fans who had never heard of them. While Walton was very animated on stage, the rest of the band seemed to be more focussed on technicality, and in my opinion could do with a bit more movement to back up their vocalists’ intensity.

The main support act was Germany’s Suidakra, a popular folk/pagan metal band who, like Battlesoul, combine melodic death metal with Celtic music and other folk influences. However unlike Battlesould they tend to favour the more traditional metal side with the folk elements accenting the sound rather than overpowering it. While I found their performance to be energetic and technically proficient, their sound came across as a bit indistinguishable from the glut of folk/death bands that are currently dominating the metal scene. However in their defence I have to say that the crowd ate up their entire set. But their enthusiasm paled in comparison the reaction when Orphaned Land finally hit the stage.

The Israelis arrived clad in their traditional Jewish/Arabic clothing from the recent photo-shoot for their latest album The Neverending Way of OrwarriOr, with frontman Kobi Farhi donning his Jesus outfit (it also helps that he very much looks the part).

Orphaned Land

OrwarriOr was produced by Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, who described it as “a musical travelogue.” This description became more apt as the band delivered a 90-minute set featuring tracks from the new release as well as their previous smash album Mabool. From the opening chords of “Sapari” and “From Broken Vessels” to the final chants of “Norra El Norra”, the band took the audience through seamless highs and lows on their journey through Middle Eastern metal. 

It’s very hard the find a band that melds contemporary and traditional music in such a way where both are blended perfectly, as opposed to a metal band that simply overlays their sound with a few samples. With Orphaned Land, Middle Eastern and Oriental music is implemented into the metal to create a new way of playing and singing, so that it’s often hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Some tracks burst with dense riffing and extreme vocals only to make way for Hebrew and Arabic singing and mild transcendent chord progressions. The crowd response was huge throughout the set, and reached a fever pitch as the band came to the end with Farhi proudly proclaiming “we bring you peace and love from the Middle East.”

Click here to check out my blog about Orphaned Land and their new album, and click here to see some amazing fan-filmed footage of the final moments of the show.

Sunday March 14, 2010

For some people CMW was basically over by the time Sunday rolled around. But luckily for fans of heavy music, one of the ten CMW shows going on that night was the Toronto stop of The Dillinger Escape Plan’s North American tour which packed The Opera House to the brim.

Things got off to a bit of a restless start due to the absence of much-hyped opening act Animals As Leaders from Washington DC, who ended up not showing due to an apparent vehicle failure. So the opening slot fell to Shreveport, Louisiana’s comedy metalcore act iwrestledabearonce. Alot of excitement had built up over AAL’s appearance at the gig, so IWABO had their work cut out for them. For some heavy music fans they’re a bit of a controversial band as part of their music, image, and performance involves making fun of the parts of the metal genre that they feel are taken too seriously. This approach is more about the desire to have fun onstage rather than showing contempt for any part of the metal subculture.

So when vocalist Krysta Cameron took the stage in a Furby costume it frankly wasn’t much of a surprise. Although I don’t find that their sound differentiates much from the standard metalcore bag-of-tricks, they are certainly an entertaining live act and kept me attentive and smiling throughout their performance (although it certainly didn’t cease the grumbling of some of the fans who couldn’t get over their disappointment of missing AAL).

The middle slot was taken up by Washington’s Darkest Hour. This band has been hit and miss with me for a long time, and this set didn’t do much to change that. In their most serene moments the guitar duo of Mike Carrigan and Mike Schleibaum expel incredible bursts of melodic riffing and fist-pumping solos that would warm the heart of any classic metal fan.

Unfortunately this usually gives way to the standard chug-chug / shout-sing formula that characterizes the metalcore genre. While Darkest Hour attempts to blend metalcore with more traditional elements, they seem at odds with each other, and it makes for a bit of an uncomfortable listen. About half the audience seemed to be getting as restless as I was, but that doesn’t mean that the band didn’t have a large gang of supporters going crazy for them in the pit.

Finally it was time for Dillinger. Touring ahead of the release of their fourth album Option Paralysis, their set proved to be the most enjoyable I’ve ever seen from the group. Now that DEP have a bit of a catalogue behind them the set-list is more diverse than ever, and coupled with an incredible lighting setup, they whipped the crowd into a frenzy with their trademark equipment-swinging, speaker-climbing, stage-diving performance.

What’s different about Option Paralysis is that it eschews DEP’s traditional mixture of mathcore songs sitting next to radio-friendly pop ditties for a few more eclectic mid-tempo numbers. Songs would ebb and flow in a constant near-tantric state, while the band members flung themselves violently across the stage. Perhaps it was their recent stint on Nine Inch Nails’ farewell tour, or perhaps it’s just due to their collective experience, but that night Dillinger played as if they were in front of thousands rather than a mid-sized venue. They’ve somehow become more intense, if that’s even possible. The mixture of metalheads, hardcore kids, hipsters, punks, and emos all left sweaty, broken, and grinning from ear to ear.

The Dillinger Escape Plan

So that wraps up my heavy CMW coverage. I was extremely pleased with what seems to be the fest’s commitment to making heavy music a part of their palette. The lineup for North By Northeast has just started to be announced. Let’s hope they follow suit.

Click here for Part 1

Andrew, the EM intern