While She Sleeps, with support from Create to Inspire and Fallen Riot, Ironworks, Inverness, 29/5/2015. A review.
Opening act and local band Fallen Riot are the first of this evening’s tinnitus inducing noise-mongers. They’ve taken a decent sized local support along to see them and overall they’re a pretty slick outfit. They certainly go down well and despite saying they were “shitting ourselves” they put nerves aside enough to get a few additional fans judging by the interest at the merch stand.
Next up Essex based Create to Inspire create their own bloody racket despite their name sounding like something you might find as a course available at the Eden Court. According to their facebook page they’re a ‘british melodic hardcore’ band, to be honest I can’t keep up with the various sub genres in metal these days so I’ll have to take their word for it!
The first pits of the evening appear while they’re on stage, they’re a likeable bunch and they’re obviously delighted to be on tour with While She Sleeps and make the best use of their time whipping up a cacophonous storm. Again they go down well and you have to hand it to Inverness audiences here, they always seem to give support acts a fair shot and quite often give as enthusiastic a reception to the support as they do to the main act.
While She Sleeps are a man down, lead guitarist Sean Long having had to head home to attend to a family emergency. Rather than bail, WSW use a recording of his ‘widdly bits’ as a backing track, leaving Mat Welsh to crunch out the rhythm section. They’re touring off the back of their latest album ‘Brainwashed’ and by two songs in they’ve already created carnage in front of the stage as the pits form and bodies flail around.
Applying their own sonic scorched earth policy, they pull out all the stops, despite having one less guitarist and a few technical issues that threatened to hold things up even further. ‘Four Walls’ with its refrain, “So when the saints go marching in, they won’t be singing for your sins…” is met with raised arms and fans in full voice.
‘Our Courage, Our Cancer’ is dedicated to their absentee guitarist, and throughout vocalist Loz Taylor is imperious and in complete command of the stage and pits.
It’s very easy to forget that not so long ago the whole band’s future was in doubt due to Loz requiring serious throat surgery. The only concession in evidence is Matt Welsh taking on slightly more vocal duties but on the whole he sounds as strong and savage as ever.
Unfortunately it’s a slightly shorter set than we might have hoped for, but all things considered they may not have played at all. Metal Hammer called this ‘fight music’. They’re on to something there.
