Bloodshot Dawn, Seprevation & Overoth
Monday 27th October 2014 – Voodoo, Belfast
Those out for a leisurely stroll around Belfast’s city centre last Monday night could be forgiven for their mistaken belief that the Apocalypse had arrived, noisily and mercilessly, on their doorstep. Fear not, nervous Nellies! It was simply The Distortion Project temporarily making it’s home in Voodoo, Belfast.
Starting proceedings off in suitably ominous fashion was local lads Overoth. “We are Overoth, from the shadows of Belfast!”, intoned vocalist Andy Ennis to a small but devoted crowd, before the band unleashed their bruising brand of death metal. Their tricky and quite technical riffs, combined with deep, guttural growls and ‘headbanger’s dream’ pounding beats, created a sort of ‘Behemoth meets Machinehead’ snarling beast of a sound.
Rattling through numbers such as ‘Death Personified’, ‘The Greatest Lie’ and new track ‘Gods of Delusion’, the band’s short, sharp set left the crowd feeling like the cobwebs had been well and truly blown out.
Second support act, Bristol’s Seprevation, are a slightly different creature, in that they add their obvious love of thrash to their death metal. The result is a blistering pace, a snarling/spitting/screaming vocalist – and a drummer undergoing one hell of a workout! Said vocalist/bassist Lluc Tupman even displays shades of a young James Hetfield in his singing and playing styles.
They played a mix of songs from both their 2012 EP ‘Ritual Abuse’ and May 2014 debut album ‘Consumed’, stirring up not only a brace of headbanging but even a moshpit and a Wall of Death! As an added bonus they also threw in a wildly skidding cover of Maiden’s ‘The Trooper’, to whoops of delight from the room. Brilliant.
So, that was the cobwebs sorted and the blood pumping – it was time to see if Bloodshot Dawn could live up to the hype surrounding them since their appearance at Bloodstock this summer.
If their powerfully charged intro and blasting beat right from their opening number was anything to go by, the answer is an emphatic ‘yes!’. BD also like to mix things up sound-wise, combining the power and brutality of death metal with the melody and groove of old school thrash and even the histrionics of power metal. Your reviewer even picked up traces of the blues (in some of the deep, meandering guitar solos) and some Pink Floyd-esque prog – if said prog were on steroids, that is.
The outcome of that ‘a bit of this, a pinch of that’ alchemy is a band delivering piledriving riffs, at a breakneck pace, with a dark, menacing tone – modern melodic death metal at its best, essentially. They sounded tight and impressively loud, the crowd interaction was good (despite said crowd numbers being a bit, well, underwhelming), with some silly banter and Wall of Death demands adding to the atmosphere.
A brief snippet of ‘Master of Puppets’, as well as such pummelling tracks as ‘Godless’, ‘Vision’ and ‘Demons’, the title track from their just-released Kickstarter funded second album, showed without a doubt that Bloodshot Dawn are well and truly deserving of the recent buzz around them.
Frankly, if you didn’t come away from this gig with ringing ears and headbanger’s neck, you did it wrong. Thrilling, visceral and immense, these three bands certainly livened up the evening for the clever few who chose to go to a Monday night gig. The Apocalypse? Nah, Just the future of British death metal.
Photos courtesy of Paul Verner at livei.co.uk
