Words by Simon Russell-White
Pix by Reece Trudgen
Yet another balmy night in Brisbane town this evening, so what better way to spend it than to sweat it up with a few hundred summer-loving/hardcore music-loving humans?
Full disclosure, I missed the opener Crossface‘s complete set. Partly due to how long it took to gain entry
to The Brightside, as security was tight and free full pat downs were issued for everyone involved…
Apologies to the band, but by all accounts, I was told it was a fantastic opening set.
Once we entered the main Music Hall – a smaller church-sized venue with its jet black interior – we were
greeted with the second act, local hardcore five-piece Crave Death. As always it was a slam from
beginning to end with the strong urging to unleash hell on each other mainly coming by way of the band’s frontwoman Candice Bankovacki as she delivered yet another furious low-end vocal assault.
There seemed to be some sound issues on stage, with guitars coming and going in the mix, and at times
the snare drum dominated the front of house on and off. Having said that, this didn’t lessen the crowd’s
energy with hardcore-style dance moves being performed by a number of punters which was cool to witness for a band placed in an early position on tonight’s four-band bill. Solid performance, but the energy was only building at this point.
Comeback Kid frontman Andrew Neufeld put it best when giving a shout-out to California’s Drain during
their set, “Drian are one of the best things to happen to hardcore in a long time”. Boy was he right. From the onset the four-piece launched headlong into a chaotic tirade of full beatdown tracks with a splash of that killer sweet ‘CroMags’ like attitude and energy.
From early in the set members of the crowd were making it a regular pass time to catapult from the stage – this being one thing I’ve always enjoyed about The Brightside being the intimacy it can create between band and crowd as there is no barrier between the two, and the stage is low and makes for a perfect launching pad for punters.
At one point an over-ambitious human cannonball overshot the mark and managed to collide with (and open) the side venue exit door near the left side of the stage! But, as expected, his fellow brothers dusted him off and sent him back to the stage for another aerial combat move soon after.
Being my first time seeing Drain in a live setting I was taken aback by the pure energy the band was dishing out and managing to sustain throughout their blistering set. Sammy Ciaramitaro (vocals) and Tony Chavez (guitar) are pure madmen who ooze the hardcore punk way simply by giving it all they have.
Special mention must go to their new bassist – who I will purposely refer to as Pit Cordell due to his sporting of a pair of sick ‘Pit Viper’ sunglasses and his uncanny Cordell Crockett (Ugly Kid Joe) style stage moves. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure when Sammy introduced Mr. ‘Pit C’ he said that it was not only his first live gig but his first ever time playing bass live!!! This was a shock as he absolutely and unequivocally slayed the set and kept flawlessly locked in with skins beast Tim Flegal (drums) for the entire set.
The highlight song from the Drain set was without doubt California Cursed, simply because it launched
the crowd from an already frenzied pit of mayhem to a fire-ravaged hornet’s nest. Pure, utter, unrelenting chaos. Simply one of the best hardcore band performances I’ve ever witnessed. Drain are without doubt the future of hardcore/ hardcore punk, and thank goodness for that.
If you’ve never been to The Brightside before let me tell you this venue gets real hot, real quick, and once there it stays that way until the last punter exits. So, by the time Winnipeg, Canada’s Comeback Kid took the stage we all were sharing a melting pot of sweat soup and it was clear that Gatorades were required for the die-hard punters at the front of the stage after taking blow after blow during the Drain set.
There are a lot of elements that make for an extremely enjoyable experience seeing Comeback Kid as a
live band. They promote “Summertime Vibes” as part of their version of hardcore punk and feed purely off the crowd’s energy. It’s an invisible contract with the paying people: the harder we go, the harder they
go, simple as that!
Though the set ignited like a jet engine, vocalist Andrew Neufeld was visibly in need of more from the crowd as a “horseshoe” shape was forming on and off. For anyone who doesn’t know, this is common during this style of music as it gives room for some serious beat-down hardcore dance moves, with my personal favourite being the classic Two Step due to it matching with the flow of certain beats per minute during a track of this style. Ohh and it looks super cool when a lot of people do it, nice one kids!
Anyway, I digress.
Like the Drain set, security did their best to ensure crowd safety but as Comeback Kid continued their live assault there were moments of pure, beautiful madness with microphones being shared on and off-stage by the band and anyone willing to forward flip back onto the dance floor, and when the crowd thinned in parts that exact thing occurred. How painful, but how rad!
Comeback Kid have a way of evoking pure uncompromised energy from their fans, with pulses of gang vocals in classic tracks like Wake the Dead and fresh tracks like the title track from their latest album Heavy Steps only adding raw sugar to the mix.
What a time it was. Now time for a cold shower…
