Periphery – Gig Review & Photo Gallery 8th November @ Max Watts, Melb/Naarm VIC

Periphery
Max Watts, Melbourne/Naarm, Vic
November 8th, 2024Support: Reliqa and Crooked Royals

I thought it’d been a while, but Periphery’s frontman Spencer Sotelo confirms it: it has been almost eight years since this band graced our shores with their majestic presence. Of course, they have a pretty good excuse – a little event called the ‘Covid pandemic’ kinda got in the way.

Whatever the case, it is so, so good to have them back, and they make it worth every second of the wait.

The bonus is a superb undercard. Crooked Royals hail from Kiwi-land, a country (unlike Australia) not known for its love or production of heavy music artists. There must be some kind of scene in the nation across the Tasman for the style however, as these guys have a developed live sound and stage presence, something only possible through extensive touring and playing constant live shows, and are popular enough to have been selected to tour Australia with the mighty Periphery.

This band consists of two frontmen, two guitars and a drummer, and they slam out a melodic strain of nu-metal and prog-tinged metalcore with great gusto. Their energetic thirty-minute set is highlighted by choreographed stage moves, which look cool, and some sweet texture amid the crunch provided by mesmerising tapping guitars. The twin frontman approach lends proceedings a constant visual and aural spectacle (both singers have nice melodic cleans and searing uncleans, both interact with the crowd expertly and both are on the move constantly across the stage), and they put it all together in a package that is both impactful and accessible.

This band is on its way to becoming heavy music royalty.

Sydney’s Reliqa are on their way to becoming a national heavy music treasure; if they’re not there already. And tonight they do absolute justice to this prestigious support slot. Frontwoman Monique Pym even states that Periphery are a big influence on their sound.

Speaking of Pym, she is a true visual as well as vocal focal point for this band, and tonight she sounds fabulous, looks fabulous and performs fabulously. The band behind her, a stripped-back guitar, bass and drums lineup (with a little tasteful, never-overwrought digital enhancement), lock in tighter than a clenched fist with practiced ease and stratospheric-level musicianship. The other bonus is that a lineup like that renders everything pleasingly audible, little to nothing gets lost in the mix.

The lineup may be stripped back, but the sound is absolutely not – for the uninitiated, their music is a dizzying, frenetic take on heavy progressive rock, with a beautifully coordinated and cohesive tsunami of notes flying at you from all directions at a billion NPS (notes per second.) At the same time, they sure do know how and when to pull back and let things breathe a little, and to that end, tonight we get the emotional showstopper ‘Sariah’. We also get something brand new late in the set, a swoony mid-tempo rocker with another emotive vocal performance from Pym.

Reliqa prove themselves to be another perfect selection as main support to a big international headliner, and we are now more than ready for said big headliner.

The venue is jam-packed to the back for the start of Periphery’s set, almost eight years of anticipation palpable amongst the punters in attendance tonight. Their intro music only builds that anticipation even further, before they explode onto the stage, their veritable phalanx of guitars roaring and screaming; fill-in drummer, Aussie David Parkes (Matt Halpern has stayed at home fulfilling his duties as a new father), slamming down the band’s complicated, syncopated grooves and thundering around the kit at every appropriate opportunity (Parkes may not be the picture of perpetual motion that Halpern is, but he does a damn admirable job anyway, given what must be a tough task and massive shoes to fill); and frontman Spencer Sotelo up front, screaming as though his life depends on it.

It’s quite possibly impossible for a human being to scream any harder for that long.

For the next eighty minutes, this juggernaut of a band absolutely carve it up for their adoring crowd, smashing out an epic, crowd-pleasing setlist featuring such favourites as recent (ish) single ‘Wildfire’, ‘Letter Experiment’ (from way back on their debut album from 2010), the monumental ‘Satellites’ and bone-crushing closer ‘Blood Eagle’.

At some point during their set, I realise that I’ve seen Periphery and Tesseract in the one year, after seeing them together on the one bill a decade or so ago (which, when you throw Twelve Foot Ninja into the mix, is one of the all-time great bills we’ve seen here.) The two bands often get compared to each other, but I love them both, and while they are considered very much in the same musical ballpark, I love them for very different reasons. Tesseract are flawless, musically, instrumentally, aurally, visually, which is fantastic; whereas Periphery have more of a chaotic rawness to them in a live setting, a feeling that they are teetering on the brink of disintegration (although they never quite get there), which adds a joyous edginess to their live presentation. This is also fantastic. Another major difference is that Tesseract are dark and dead-serious throughout their set (which, of course, is totally cool, it’s dark and serious music), whereas the members of Periphery have almost perpetual smiles on their dials and appear to be having an absolute ball onstage.

Anyway, enough of the comparisons.

This band somehow manages to be idiosyncratic innovators, monstrously heavy and highly memorable and accessible all at once, their songs epic and cathartic anthems and their live show a joyously rough-around-the-edges tour de force.

Three bands representing three different nations, each with their own unique take on progressive heavy music, with the headliner in absolutely scintillating and stellar form, makes this one of the absolute gigs of the year.

Review by Rod Whitfield

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

Crooked Royals
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Reliqa

Periphery