Gig

To The Grave - Gig Review 29th July @ Stay Gold, Melbourne, Vic

Walladmin

Heavy Metal Wordsmith

Jul 30, 2023

7 min read

To The Grave
Stay Gold, Melbourne, Vic
July 29th, 2023
Support: Starve, Melancolia and The Wandering

I did not expect this to happen, but deathcore music has grabbed me by the proverbials in the last few years and will not let go, and this is possibly my very first true deathcore live show (unless you count bands like [early] Make Them Suffer or Born of Osiris as deathcore). So to say I am excited to get the full experience is an understatement.

That said, this is not necessarily a wall-to-wall night of pure deathcore. This lineup is a well-chosen selection of four heavy bands with just enough variety, just enough separation to keep things interesting, to ensure you don’t feel you are watching the same band over and over. So kudos to the bookers of tonight’s festivities.

Openers The Wandering mine the very raw, harsh end of the deathcore lode, with their extraordinarily abrasive vocals and overall stripped-back aesthetic. They cram their brief, 30-minute opening set with their short, sharp, in-your-face songs and a potent level of energy that only grows as their set progresses. By mid-set they are flying. Their no-frills approach and slight roughness around the edges turn out to be among their best assets, their only concession to technology being the regular bass drops that come in, rattle ribcages and add depth to a sound where the bass guitar is a little drowned out.

Overall, The Wandering provide a blistering opening to tonight’s heavy entertainment, and the quickly growing crowd warms as the Melbourne winter night outside grows colder.

The night takes a sharpish turn to the left as Melancolia take the stage to a pumping industrial intro. This band does not fit overly comfortably into the deathcore box. For example, frontman Alex Hill takes more cues from the likes of Marilyn Manson and Dani Filth, visually and vocally, than he does from Will Ramos or CJ McMahon, and their sound features just a smidgeon more melody here and there amidst the maelstrom of sound. However, they still slot into this lineup nicely. Different, but not jarringly so.

They bring a gothy melancholy and moodiness to juxtapose with their deathcore slam, and it makes them stand out nicely.

Mid-late set, Hill attempts a very different type of audience participation session, urging the people in the crowd to pull out their mobiles and shine their phone torches at the stage. We do, almost to a man/woman, and it creates an interesting effect in the room.

Unfortunately, earlier technical difficulties eat into the time allocated to their already brief set, and we only get around 25 minutes of Melancolia. It’s enough to whet the appetite for this band however, and further investigation reveals that they are actually signed to Nuclear Blast, so a huge future awaits them if they work hard and manage their career intelligently.

Starve are a slightly different kettle of fish again for this lineup, being more of an up-tempo, high-energy metalcore ensemble, although certainly residing at the more brutal end of the metalcore spectrum. They maintain those high energy and intensity levels for the entirety of their 30-minute support set, and the crowd, many of whom seem to know many of the lyrics to their tunes, respond in a moshing and crowd-surfing frenzy.

Said crowd, by the way, is sold out this night, and by the time Starve hit the stage, is at heaving, crushing capacity. And this band’s music, stage presence and fierce, fiery performance fire the crowd to boiling point just in time for the main act to erupt.

Deathcore has gone gangbusters in recent years (even capturing the attention of a crusty old metalhead like yours truly), both in terms of the quality of music bands are putting out there and the ever-increasing profile of said bands (the two factors going hand in hand of course), on the back of bands like Lorna Shore, Signs of the Swarm, Slaughter to Prevail and Darko US. Australia has already had Thy Art is Murder in place as one of the leaders for quite some time. More recent years have seen To The Grave step up to the plate big time, although they have been around for more than a decade, attaining a global following and becoming a leader of the sub-genre.

Their set tonight makes it easy to see why.

Right from the outset, this band brings true slamming deathcore intensity, driven by the triggered, dominating precision and presence of drummer Simon O’Malley (whom I saw warming up at the back of the venue for an hour during the support acts) and led by ‘wrecking-ball of energy’ frontman Dane Evans.

What vocalists like Evans do never ceases to amaze, both in terms of their abilities to switch up from screams to screeches to guttural lows on a dime, and their endurance and physicality as vocal athletes, seemingly ripping the living shit out of their lungs and vocal cords for an hour or more every night without doing permanent damage. It’s super-human, and tonight Evans is in throat-shredding form, although at least two other members of the band share some of the vocal burdens at times too.

Of course, it takes more than a great frontman to make a great band, and around Evans, the highly skilled band members lock in tighter than a clenched fist. Together they joyously pummel the audience with the aural might of their music for just under an hour, right up until the encore of ‘The Ghost of You’, which sees at least 15 people onstage going off their heads while the crazy crowd in the pit does the same.

Led by To The Grave, tonight is a celebration of brutality, and a tremendous showcase of the extreme talent in extreme music that this nation possesses.

Review by Rod Whitfield @Rod_Whitfield

Suss out our feature on TTG in Wall of Sound TV below!