»28th October 2008

Unholy Alliance Chapter III



So last night I went to see Slayer live for the third time. The first being at Unholy Alliance Chapter II and the second time at Download '07. This has kept up my seeing Slayer once a year run. The concert was initially supposed to be at the Manchester Arena like last time but at some point the venue was changed to the Apollo. Annoyingly, the people I ordered the ticket from, Seetickets, didn't feel the need to tell me that the concert was now at an entirely different venue. I only found out about the venue change when JK, who accompanied me to the concert, checked out the M.E.N. website. So thankfully, we deftly side-stepped one huge hulking potential fuck up, and this was before even going to Manchester!
I'd guess that the venue change had something to do with poor ticket sales. However, this doesn't make an awful lot of sense, the last time Slayer did the Arena--the last time I seen them at Manchester--the place seemed pretty packed. The M.E.N. has a capacity of around 20,000, the Apollo on the other hand is about 3,500, so that's a big step-down in terms of venue. Doubly confusing is that fact that the line up this time was certainly higher profile than on the previous tour. Last time, for the European tour, Slayer were accompanied by In Flames, Children of Bodom, Lamb of God and Thine Eyes Bleed. This time it was Trivium, Mastodon, Amon Amarth, and Veil, who were the token local band I think. As disliked as Trivium seemed to be by the Slayer crowd, they are still a very big band, and Mastodon are a big fucking band, I mean Mastodons are massive elephant creatures. Additionally unusual was the fact that the tour t-shirt I picked up had the venues printed on the back and it said the venue was the Apollo. Now when I first found out about the gig in the first half of September on my trip to Malham Cove, the venue was still Manchester Arena. I find it somewhat hard to believe that in the four or five weeks since me finding out about the gig, and sometime after the event was changed, that the tour t-shirts were printed off with the corrected venue... Anyway, enough speculation about the reason for the venue change, and enough criticism of the dozy idiots at Seetickets--who don't think a venue change is the sort of important development that ticket buyers would like to be told about in advance--and onto the gig itself!
First off, the Manchester Apollo was the first stop on the tour. Awesome! The Apollo as a venue has really grown on me now, even if you're stood by the sound desk, you're still not that far away from the band, being a smaller venue, it's more intimate.
We had to train it to Manchester Piccadilly, so this was an added complication brought on by the venue change. The Manchester Arena is literally above Manchester Victoria Station, the Apollo is around a mile walk from Manchester Piccadilly. Last time we walked to the Apollo--though that was from the middle of the city centre from some carpark and not just from Piccadilly--we got horribly lost walking parallel with the train line, and not particularly in the direction of the Apollo itself. Thankfully, through superior planning (I levelled up my planning skill a lot during the Metallica-Dublin trip) and sticking to the plan we successfully arrived at the Apollo on time.


During Slayer's set, circle pits would open up in preparation for insane fast parts of songs. The Slayer crowd really have their shit together.

On the train to Manchester we were sat near a bunch of other Slayer fans, it soon became apparent that we were all going to see Slayer and there was a silent recognition of fraternity and brotherhood that is only felt between fellow Slayer fans. There was occasional conversation with the other Slayer fans about seeing Slayer last time, the then and current line-up for Unholy Alliance, the venue change, and the set-list. Worryingly, whichever song I mentioned it would be 'awesome if they played' was apparently on the set-list, which the Slayer fan sat next to me had apparently saw ahead of schedule somehow. Yet again I had to deal with the fact that Slayer probably weren't going to play Reign In Blood in its entirety and that the concert wouldn't be exactly like the DVD Still Reigning, though this is merely splitting hairs, the totality of the awesomeness would never be in question, I mean it's fuckin' Slayer, COME ON!
Whilst there was a mental-slayer-trivia-arm-wrestle between the Seemingly-knowledgeable-Slayer-fan and myself, one of his friends kept piping up about how 'Kerry can't fucking shred', which irritated me. Lo and behold, it was one of those annoying metal fans! It turned out all of these Slayer fans played guitar, there is something I find accutely annoying about most other guitarists, and it was evident here. The Kerry-hater, lamented the shitness of Music Ground, the guitar shop in Leeds. Whilst I do dislike Music Ground--the staff are unhelpful, condescending and rude--I had to defend the shop just because I didn't like the Kerry-hater very much. The train ride to Manchester is only about forty five minutes, so despite the Kerry-hater, the density of fuckings was low.
Seemingly-knowledgable-Slayer-fan told us that doors were actually at five, which was the third time for doors I had heard from several far more reputable sources. This cast the accuracy of pretty much everything printed on my Slayer ticket into further disrepute. It also meant that my 'buffer time' would have entirely disappeared and that we would have to get to the Apollo very quickly indeed or risk missing several of the bands.


Obligatory post-gig photo. Lots of satisfied Slayer fans.

As an aside, here's a short explanation of 'buffer time' as part of the gig theory laid down by the esteemed academic, Dr. Menzigen. Buffer Time is the time which is added onto the approximation of how long getting to a venue will take, to account for things going wrong. Usually, a safe buffer time is an hour or two, but it can be anything up to several hours or even a day depending on a number of factors from the distance of the concert from start point, the concert-going expertise of the participants, to how important or esteemed the performing band or artist might be. For example, seeing a band someone who you didn't particularly like from school at a local pub would need a buffer time of only aroud five minutes whilst attending an intimate invite-only Nine Inch Nails concert at Vladivostock would have a buffer time possibly measured in several days or even weeks.

The Menzigen formula:
concert travel time (c)=estimated travel time (e)+things going wrong time(t)
e=(estimated train time+bus time+walk time etc.)+buffer time (b)
t=(random fuck ups)*public transport+disaster

Anyway, back to the gig. As it turned out, doors was actually half five--not seven, half six, or five--though the queue didn't really start moving until more like twenty to six, despite it seeming that the first band, Veil, had already begun. It was whilst queuing that I became irritated at how many of the metal fans attending were clearly too young and also how many lacked even remotely long hair... I mean if you're bald fine, so is Kerry King, but otherwise I want to be seeing you sporting Jeff Hanneman golden locks! We got into the Apollo soon after the queue had started moving and thankfully without any problems with tickets, 'standing' for the M.E.N. thankfully translated to 'stalls' for the Apollo, so we could take up positions in front of the sound desk for the end of Veil. I decided to get my obligatory multiple merchandise purchases out of the way at the beginning so there wouldn't be any problems of cool t-shirts selling out or ridiculous, sweaty queuing after the gig, plus it allowed for a quick getaway so there'd be no missing the train back. I picked up a Slayer t-shirt with the tour dates obviously, and a Mastodon t-shirt with a bigfoot-type creature in the woods on the front--typical Mastodon.

'Which one do you want?'
'Erm... the one with the skull on the front... no, the other skull one... with the army hat... no, not the army helmet... yeah that one... large... LARGE!...'

Veil

Not many people had filtered into the lower area where we were for Veil, and we only heard the last two and a half songs they played. They seemed to be fairly okay, Kerry-hater on the train concluded with they were 'shit' but I now feel inclined to disagree with him on principle. I didn't really get a sense of what sort of music they were playing beyond some kind of vague extreme/death metal, but it was probably okay, they had the front few rows of people pretty fired up and they're local, so that endears me to them. Veil provided JK with an opportunity to test out the MP3 recorder he had slipped past the Apollo staff orange fun-fascists. Bootleg ahoy!

Amon Amarth

Pre-concert research had meant that I had recently bought an Amon Amarth album to get a feel for their music, it's apparently their new album Twilight of the Thunder God if I wasn't specifically looking for an Amon Amarth I'd have likely still bought it anyway on the basis of the cover artwork which depicts THOR WRESTLING THE MIDGARD SERPENT IN A STORMY OCEAN. 'So it's power metal then', well, almost, it's viking-themed melodic death metal, and these guys are from Sweden mainly, so they should know all about vikings. Amon Amarth is apparently elvish for Mount Doom, fortunately they're not a bunch of Tolkien LARPers. For Amon Amarth I decided to get a little nearer the front, so I left my coat with JK who was better able to get a decent recording sound with my coat to hide the recorder as the quality was pretty poor for Veil with the recorder being in his pocket.


Amon Amarth clearly enjoyed themselves a lot and played some wicked tunes.

Being only the second act, Amon Amarth played a fairly short set. It was just great, they played Twilight of the Thunder God, which I enjoyed immensely. Amon Amarth all know what the score is, synchronised head-banging, the singer coming on-stage with a drinking horn hanging from his belt, some impressive metal-beardage on display. Amon Amarth had some very satisfying inter-song patter, 'Are you ready for some METAL!' [crowd] 'Why yes I believe we are!' 'HEAVY FUCKING METAL!?' [crowd] 'Yayyyyy!' You can't fail to get a crowd on-side when you tell them that 'we've come to this country again because you guys know a lot about METAL' Ah, great stuff.

Mastodon

This was the second time I had seen Mastodon. I first saw them at Download '07, I wasn't entirely impressed with them at the time, something didn't feel quite right. It was probably more down to the weird crowd area I seemed to have found myself in, maybe it was just weird Mastodon fans, also I probably didn't entirely get at the time that it's not really their style to talk much between songs. Either way, I was quite excited about seeing them again, having digested them some more since Download and being impressed by their stuff on the Unholy Alliance Chapter II DVD. I retained my position in the crowd for Mastodon which was in front of where the balcony ends, which was about mid-way between the sound desk and the stage.


Mastodon's bassist/singer has really nailed his rock stance.

First off, the sound for Mastodon was excellent, the vocals, guitars and bass, and especially the drums came through really well. Mastodon's drummer is just amazing, it's not a conventional metal style he plays in, but Mastodon aren't very standard metal at all, a very technical and fluid style, excellent. For some reason I find it very hard to tell a single thing Mastodon sings, they're vocals aren't particularly extreme or woolly, but I can't pick out a single word from any of their songs without a lyric sheet, this isn't really much of a problem at all, Mastodon did their proggy break-down riddled stuff and everything went well. They didn't say anything much apart from 'How are you guys doing?' after the opening salvo and maybe a 'Thanks' at the end, though even there it was more along the lines of respectful guitar salutes to the crowd and bowing. This works for Mastodon though, and the crowd was really psyched throughout, there was a particularly furious mosh pit for 'The Wolf is Loose' as could be expected, as it's a totally rocking song. Mastodon were good enough for me to text JK informing him that I thought 'Mastodon were epic'. The Mastodon set was just fantastic and awakened a great appreciation of their music. I'm going to buy another Mastodon album.

Trivium

Trivium were the token 'commercial band'. They were the final support act--and rumoured by Seemingly-knowledgable-Slayer-fan to be considered for a dual headliner with Slayer, which would just be fucking retarded--and like the final support act last time, In Flames, they were easily the most mainstream, or commercial, act at the gig, though I'm generally positive toward In Flames. Trivium really had their work cut out for them, on before Slayer and generally not regarded well by plenty of the Slayer fans there. Kerry-hater probably expressed a deep hatred for Trivium, I can't remember exactly, but it's a fair assumption to make. One of the sites I looked at after JK had found out about the venue change (no thanks to Seetickets) only referred to trivium as the 'shit betrayers' or something like that. Personally, I'm not overly keen on Trivium's vocal style, which alternates between harsh screamed vocals and clean, emotional vocals, I think it's a bit cliched and very american. The general antipathy felt towards them by the metal community (who are at best 50% comprised of dislikeable idiots) is probably more down to them being seemingly eager to inherit Metallica's metal shoes and be The Big Metal Band like 'tallica were post-AJFA and pre-black album.
I wanted to keep an open mind for Trivium, I don't see any point in getting angry about a band I don't hold any real strong opinions on and who I've paid to see. Still, it was pretty funny when there was loud booing when Trivium's needlessly large banner was unfurled at the back of the stage. It can't be nice being Trivium and being backstage listening to the crowd booing your band and chanting 'SLAY-ER! SLAY-ER! SLAY-ER!'


Trivium get the prize for strangest choice of intro tape. Foreigner - Jukebox Hero... What the hell?

Trivium had a shit load of new lights that the previous bands hadn't used, they were clearly going for much more of a big, stadium-style production than the other bands so far had been. They also had a nice ramp going up to the huge drum riser, presumably for Metallica-style running up to jam with Lars- I mean whatever their drummer is called. When they finally burst on stage, they kind of ran on and went straight into their first song, which I thought was great. Matt Heafy looked pretty mad, furious even. There was a lot of running around and leering into the crowd, which was now dominated at the front by the Trivium fans, I was still around my middle area, just trying to retain a good position for Slayer. Sound-wise, Trivium were nowhere near as good as Mastodon, I couldn't hear very much apart from the kick drum which was almost exclusively on double-bass duties continuously. It's not entirely Trivium's fault, but there was a lot of bloody kids stood around me, one of them was especially lanky and looked out of place at a heavy metal concert, he even had the audacity to be taller than me and I didn't need anyone blocking my view. Despite trying to move away from the kids on the right hand side to the middle I was unsuccessful and was beset on all sides by trivium teens, I shared the pain felt by all the Slayer brothers in the crowd. Most amusingly, some boy who couldn't have been any older than fourteen could be seen violently convulsing at the front of the balcony above me. Lots of people were looking up at this, and laughed at the shocking seated-area 'moshing'. He really did look like he was having a fit.
The only two Trivium songs I recognised were played at the end, the first should have been 'Rain' (as in the second track off Ascendency) though that doesn't sound familiar now I'm listening to it again, the closing track was obviously 'Pull Harder on the Strings of your Martyr'. Overall I didn't massively get into Trivium's set, whilst I like a lot of what Trivium do in terms of their arrangements, I don't like their lyrics and vocal stylings, also they have too many songs with stupid long names which they have to truncate when announcing live, e.g. 'A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation' becomes simply 'Gunshot'... so why wasn't it that in the first place? Slayer's closing song is 'Angel of Death', not 'Auschwitz the Meaning Pain the Way that I want You to Die Slow Death Immense Decay Showers that Cleanse you of Your Life'. Additionally, whilst I do enjoy my fair share of eighties metal, I can't quite understand why Matt Heafy decided to wear tight black jeans and massive white hi-tops, a la James Hetfield circa 1987. Trivium's bassist looked suspiciously like an eight year old.


I liked Matt Heafy's Japanese flag graphic guitars. The other guitarist, Corey Beaulieu, had some nice silver glittery banding on his guitar too that caught the light nicely.

The thumb is sideways for Trivium. On the down side, parts of their music annoy me and their fans are gay. On the plus side though they did a lot of crowd interaction and put in a lot of energy into their set, I've never seen a bassist run around a stage so much. I prefer it when bands don't take themselves too seriously, I get the feeling that in any other situation Trivium WOULD take themselves too seriously, however with a significant portion of the crowd cheering very loudly when Matt asked everyone who 'didn't like Trivium' to shout, I think they weren't aiming to try and eclipse Slayer or anything.

Slayer

Here's a set-list I mostly downloaded just now and partly remembered from last night. Where I can remember them doing seamless changes I've grouped the songs together.

Intro tape: Metal Storm
Flesh Storm
War Ensemble
Chemical Warfare... Ghosts of War
Disciple
Cult
Dittohead
Dead Skin Mask
Jihad
Seasons In The Abyss
Live Undead
South of Heaven
Raining Blood
Angel of Death

Oh yeah... this is what it's all about. You already know how awesome Slayer are, if you really need help making your mind up, there's always the Christ Illusion review if you enjoy mountains of superlatives.


You could occasionally see the familiar silhouette of Kerry King and a B.C. Rich headstock on the screen. Totally awesome.

Before Slayer came on, a white sheet came down across the stage to hide the demonic rituals that must be performed to summon Slayer to the stage. Occasionally a man would reach out from under the sheet and test the mic, at one point, presumably due to technical problems with the lights for the crowd's amusement one of the crew climbed up the wire ladder to fiddle around on the lighting rig. This was of course accompanied by the now almost continuous chanting of 'Slay-er!' and also 'Jump, jump, jump'. Sadly, the crew guy didn't jump off and absail down tearing the sheet in two James Bond-style to reveal the band who would then open into something awesome like Hell Awaits... NO! The selfish crew member just climbed back down the wire ladder.
Whilst waiting for Slayer some drunk guy in his forties with a beard started talking to me, asking if Dave Lombardo had re-joined the band. I was initially confused, he had re-joined for the recording of the most recent album Christ Illusion in 2006, but I wasn't aware that he'd since left again only to re-join, as is the trend with Dave Lombardo. No, it turned out that he hadn't seen Slayer in ten years... ah, that makes more sense, so I informed him that Paul Bostoph had left and Dave Lombardo had returned and this pleased him greatly. The conversation on how great various metal bands continued for a few minutes with this guy until the lights went down an

FFUUUUCCCKKKKIINGGG SLAAAYYERRR!!!


Non-shit concert photos courtesy of my new phone and not my long-suffering digital camera.

What's this!? Where is the South of Heaven intro tape?! What the hell... Is that 'Metal Storm'? the song I joked to JK it would be awesome if they opened 'before going into some accoustic love ballads' or something else improbable... This was just crazy, 'Metal Storm' makes a great intro tape. As predicted by the sage Seemingly-knowledgable-Slayer-fan, the first track was Flesh Storm, which is just great opener. It was at this point that the crowd went fucking nuts, there was a massive surge forward as expected and then some seriously intense moshing. So far at the concert I had endeavoured to be in a position where I could see the circle pits and enjoy watching the chaos, but basically everywhere forward of the balcony was one giant pit. It was crazy.
'Chemical Warfare' straight into 'Ghosts of War' was just godly, they should do that a lot more. The two songs were on different albums, but Ghosts of War starts with a sample of Chemical Warfare and is a kind of second part to the song, talking about the aftermath of war. Chemical Warfare marked another particularly awesome moment in the movements of the crowd, it wasn't particularly a circle pit, it was just fucking chaos, perfect.
My area of the crowd was pretty exhausted after 'Disciple' and things eased off a little for the middle of the set. 'Jihad' started with a great little cymbal intro by Dave Lombardo, he's a tricky little customer, I thought at first he was going to go into Criminally Insane like he did on the Still Reigning DVD, but Jihad was just as welcome. The middle section of 'Jihad' before the solo section (from 1:49 on the album version) sounded great, I love those kinds of angular Hanneman riffs. Disciple and Jihad was a particularly good songs live, the tempo of old Slayer is still in these new songs, but there's also an amazing weight and power in some of the monstrous mid-tempo sections. Seasons in the Abyss is about as close as Slayer get to a stoned-out chill-out song, the first section instead, which came through really clearly. 'Live Undead' was a very welcome and unusual inclusion on the set-list. Along with Ghosts of War, it's one of those songs from South of Heaven I just never envisaged them playing much live, 'Behind the Crooked Cross' is another similar song which would have been fantastic to hear.


I'd pay £29.50 just to see the South of Heaven intro.

The final trio of songs is obviously the sort of thing which really makes the crowd go nuts. The 'South of Heaven' intro tape is like some addrenaline shot straight into your ear, it's the sound of an imminent Slayering. The South of Heaven intro saw the best usage made of the LED screen Slayer had set up behind them in place of a banner like the previous three bands. South of Heaven comes on and then three great big crucifixes come up on a black screen, as the song progresses these begin rotating and end the song inverted. You just can't beat a good old helping of Satanic imagery at a metal concert.


Strobing lights during the Raining Blood outro.

Following this with 'Raining in Blood' results in a truly awe-inspiring mosh pit, absolutely insane. It's unbelievable how fast Slayer can take the 'Raining Blood' outro live, I've heard plenty of covers of the song, including some live ones, and it just never sounds as good. It's not just about how fast the drummer can do his double-kicks or how much the guitars wail, it's about managing to turn up the tempo and not turn down the power, not many bands can do that. The rapid outro to Raining Blood was just a total cacophony of noise, the strobes--which had already seen a lot of use for totally mad sections of previous songs--were just on solidly for this section, the red uplighting on Kerry and Jeff was totally spot on. In the liner notes for many metal bands, Slayer included, particular solos are credited to that particular guitarist, so for Slayer, with their penchant for duelling solos, you often see [lead: Hanneman] [lead:King] [lead:Hanneman] [lead:King] over a solo section. For the end of 'Raining Blood' the liner notes just say [noise:Hanneman, King]: Pure screaming chaos banshee death noise, right on, Slayer.
'Raining Blood' was of course followed up with the usual concert-closer, 'Angel of Death'. Needless to say, the crowd were whipped up into a total frenzy at this point. Tom Araya didn't need to do the scream at the beginning of the song, the crowd did it for him. Throughout the set, you could see that the band were really relaxed and enjoying themselves. There's not much to say about 'Angel of Death' performed live that hasn't already been said, it's just spectacular.


Up close and personal for the final three songs. This is during South of Heaven, note the now-inverted crucifixes. Sweet.

Overall, this was definitely the best Slayer gig I've been to, there was a real feedback between the crowd and the band which I didn't feel as much at the M.E.N. in 2006. At Download, Slayer's set had to be compressed because of successive bands over-running so there was no 'Angel of Death' that time though the Download '07 crowd was just amazing for the second day. The sound was probably clearer the first time I seen them but I was a lot further from the stage there and the crowd was proportionately less crazy, though even the middle to back of a Slayer crowd is more fucking crazy than most bands manage in the pit. The best part of the Apollo is the fact it's a very compact venue with a wide stage, unless you're right at the back under the balcony, like we were for Nine Inch Nails the first time, then you're never that far away from the band, and it's a lot fucking wider than the ridiculous corridor that is the Refectory at Leeds. Seeing Slayer in a large club venue like the Apollo is just without par.


I think this was taken during 'Raining Blood'.

So yeah, there's not much left to say about Slayer. Amon Amarth and Mastodon were both exceptionally good, Trivium was a slight let-down but not half as bad as a lot of people at the concert wanted it to be. £29.50 well spent, some great photos, and a bootleg! Too bad I missed out on some supposed cards for a free download of the new Slayer single, which of course Seetickets didn't tell me about either. Third Slayer gig, two more black t-shirts, one more Slayer t-shirt. Photos that don't totally suck. Apollo staff that are still evil fun-hating bastards. Now all I want is the new Slayer album to come out. In conclusion... SLLLLAAAAYYYYEEEERRRRR!!!!!


Extar, over, out.

TCP/IP, it's fucking me off. Other protocols doing little more. Definitely got worse. Now making me curse. Removing IPX. Will it ever work? Never!