Gig

Ice Nine Kills - Gig Review & Photo Gallery 5 December @ Stay Gold, Melbourne VIC

Walladmin

Heavy Metal Wordsmith

Dec 8, 2019

7 min read

Ice Nine Kills
Stay Gold, Melbourne VIC
5 December, 2019
Support: The Gloom in the Corner

Got Good Things fever yet? If not, you should, ‘cause the festivities are well underway. Sideshows popped up across Melbourne on Thursday 5 December, with a flurry of activity at Stay Gold in Brunswick, starting with the sold out Ice Nine Kills show, and followed up by a Simple Creatures DJ set - bring a Berocca to Good Things, kids.

Punters rushed into Stay Gold to secure a beer, a vantage point and a head-bang to locals The Gloom in the Corner. The emerging band have made a huge name for themselves recently and played to a very keen audience. The venue lent a hand with huge breakdowns and an Emmure-esque delivery, both instrumentally and vocally; it was a head-banger of a time. The Gloom in the Corner smashed out fresh tracks for their release Flesh & Bones to a crowd who could’ve definitely enjoyed an extended set.

The upcoming headliner was always going to be a pretty unique experience, a hard act to follow from the previous night’s Poppy performance at the very same venue. If you know what Ice Nine Kills are all about, you probably know that they’re more than just a metal band ready to drop a setlist on stage; they’re a horror band. Even the house-music before they appeared was from the Halloween movie series, setting up a gloomy and scary vibe, which built a huge amount of momentum.

Eventually, Ice Nine Kills hit the stage for the very first time EVER in Australia, seventeen years after the band’s inception. To articulate the band’s ninety minute performance is a difficult task, given what we witnessed on the stage. First and foremost, the crowd was going absolutely wild for the showmen, even just to hear their music live.

The band who pride themselves on mapping their music to horror movies new and old, opened their set with metalcore beast tracks from their latest record The Silver Scream with tracks like ‘Thank God It's Friday’ and ‘The Jig is Up’ with frontman Spencer Charnas holding a massive knife-prop and the rest of the band playing music whilst putting on a gorey performance - it was excellent. Their production quality was absolutely massive, the breakdowns were enormous and it sounded exactly how you needed to hear it - loud as fuck.

Given the length of the set, we were treated to deep-cuts off their back catalogue, matched with outfit changes and even an actress who was often the victim of the horror show. We saw clown costumes (inspired by IT), giant shark blow-ups (Jaws), horror masks (Halloween and Scream), and all sorts of different intertextual references coming through - beats me how these guys packed their bags from the U.S. will all of these props!

‘Stabbing in the Dark’ and ‘The American Nightmare’ were definitely stand-out tracks, with crowd-surfing blistering out of control and band members jumping in and out of the crowd. Ice Nine Kills definitely showed Australia that they’ve finally made it and they’re making up for lost time - I’ve seriously never ever seen anything like this, and for the length of time they played for especially for a metalcore band.

Review by Ricky Aarons @rickysaul90

Revisit our interview with Ice Nine Kills frontman Spencer Charnas chatting all things horror and their Australian debut here

Photo Gallery by Clinton Hatfield. Insta: @ampd.agency
Please credit Wall of Sound and Clinton Hatfield if you repost photos.

The Gloom in the Corner

Ice Nine Kills