Earlier this year, Deathstars released their latest offering The Perfect Cult before embarking on a European tour and the second date of the UK leg saw them hit the Academy 3 in Manchester.
Openers The Dead And The Living (5/10), who were visiting the UK for the first time in their career, were a rather difficult band to connect with. After a long and drawn-out introduction, the set finally got underway but the songs weren’t that engaging and at times, it felt like their singer Coroner couldn’t quite manage to stay in tune so it was quite disappointing. Although the band had great visuals and movement about the stage, they struggled to get the crowd involved, until Coroner asked people to yell louder than Bristol…and subsequently kept requesting this over and over (including asking us to yell louder than London, where they hadn’t yet played?) so it got rather repetitive after a while. However their song Dance With The Dead was pretty catchy and it got a few people moving about to them! There was potential in their set, and they weren’t dreadful – they just weren’t anything special.
As the lights went down, the cheers from the crowd filled the room as Deathstars (7/10) took the stage and there was a great atmosphere throughout the duration of their set. Everyone was just there to party along with the band, who had a good stage presence. Opening with Temple Of The Insects, the set was fairly The Perfect Cult-heavy, although this certainly wasn’t a bad thing as it is a great album – and it was their first full tour in support of it since it was released! However they did pay homage to their older material well, of course.
Something that was a problem throughout the set was the vocals from Whiplasher. They almost sounded like he was forcing them out and they didn’t sound as natural as they did on CD, meaning that the songs didn’t quite pack the punch they did on their recorded material. However, he was a masterful frontman, with his performance enigmatic and full of mystery, and completely shot down a pair of idiot hecklers who’d been yelling nonsense throughout their set and The Dead And The Living’s – which was much appreciated!
After quickly disappearing offstage, they returned for the encore and kicked things off with Fire Galore, with them remarking that it was a song about their recent bus fire, before closing things up with Cyanide – which got the biggest reception of the night – and Blitzkreig before they left the stage much in the same way as they came onto it – to noise and cheers from the entire room.
An all-round good night. It didn’t quite have that special something about it to make it a ‘great’ night, but a good time was had by all those who went!
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You can read our review of The Perfect Cult here.
