Live review: Cancer Bats – The Wedgewood Rooms, 6th May 2009

Ah, the mid-week club venue show in a backwater city, some time in the last few days of a band’s first overseas headliner tour; the lowish turnout, the muted enthusiasm from the crowd, the tiredness and sore throats and tour-bus ennui. You could almost be forgiven for phoning it in, going through the motions and saving it up for the big finale gig. Maybe some bands do. Cancer Bats, however, are not one of those bands.

That’s a relief for me; ever since hearing their latest album Hail Destroyer, I’ve been wanting to see Cancer Bats play. Indeed, I already have seen them, playing a Halloween crowd of fresh-faced teenage pop-metal fans in support to the tediously predictable Avenged Funeral for My Valentine Romance Boy at The Pyramids down by the sea-front. Unluckily for Cancer Bats (and myself), the acoustics of that venue aren’t really conducive to a band that focuses on heavy, low-slung riffs and roared vocals. Tonight I get the chance to actually see and hear them at the same time. Turns out it’s worth the wait.

As I arrive, support act The Plight are maybe halfway through a set of thrashy hardcore’n'roll, sounding somewhat like The Bronx, and looking somewhat like an unholy three-way crossbreeding of Sum 41, Hundred Reasons and The Towers of London. They make a righteous racket, but they’re struggling to connect with the audience – though not through lack of effort, I might add. They don’t quite have the stage-craft to whip up an aloof crowd; the songs are solid and delivered with panache, but between songs it becomes apparent that they’re a tired but plucky gang of starry-eyed twenty-somethings who’re trying their best not to sound like they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. The music’s good enough to get them a free pass; most of the people I talk to in the interval are very positive about The Plight’s performance. Consensus suggests that, once they find their stage persona mojo, we’ll be hearing a lot more from them.

When it comes to bands worth cribbing from with regards to stage presence, The Plight couldn’t be touring with a better exemplar: as soon as they appear, Cancer Bats completely own the stage. And I do mean own; they possess rather than occupy, claiming it as unassailable territory for the duration, a beach-head from which to launch an invasion. The Plight moved around plenty, but Cancer Bats throw themselves from place to place with a clenched-fist restlessness that betrays their hardcore roots. There’s very little static headbanging action; even Gimli-esque guitarist Scott Middleton moves faster than you’d think to look at him.

There’s considerable debate about how Cancer Bats should be taxonomised in the grand scheme of musical subgenres. Are they a hardcore band or a metal band? Southern rock or speedy sludge? I think the true answer is that they’re none of them, or all of them; there’s a whole grab-bag of influences packed into their material, giving a hard modern edge to the best bits of heavy music from the last forty years and playing it as fast as possible without succumbing to a coronary mid-set. Bellowing roars and screams, pounding doomy riffs with low notes that liquify your lunch, pinched harmonic so perfectly timed and pitched you could almost imagine they were coming from a sampler, and sledgehammer drumming with a fearsome groove, like someone gave Thor a bag of MDMA and parked him behind a drumkit. Cancer Bats sound huge, and heavy as hell.

Did I mention they play hard? They’re a party-hard band too, or so they tell us. In a B-movie redneck style, frontman Liam Cormier announces “Fuck Fridays, man, every night’s a Friday night!” Cancer Bats have developed the knack and stamina required to do what The Plight can’t yet manage – act as if the room’s rammed and everyone’s going crazy, even though they’re not. The psychologists and self-help types say this sort of visualisation is a powerful tool; whether they’re right or not, I don’t know, but slowly the audience are waking up a bit, getting into the grooves and shouting back at the band. Whatever they’re doing, it’s working.

The music is relentless, delivered faultlessly. It’s a little samey at times – even with a sound crew and equipment as good as The Wedge supplies, it’s hard to get the same sort of tonal subtleties from a one-guitar metal band that you can on record – but the formula is a good one, and it’s still sounding fresh enough that a full set is a pleasure to listen to. The wall of metal is occasionally broken by miniature hardcore-style beatdown sections, or longer passages where the whole band locks into a big ol’ groove, and – for me at least – this is where Cancer Bats are at their best, with great neck-breaker riffs and plenty of rhythmic space to let their skills shine out. To judge by the crowd, I may be in the minority; the younger fans especially seem to go more for the screeching thrash-out anger-anthems like “Sorceress” or “Hail Destroyer”.

Wrapping up the set with “Lucifer’s Rocking Chair” is a sound move; it’s a powerful track that doesn’t rely on sheer pace to make its impact. Returning to thrash their way through “Hundred Grand Canyon” as an encore is better still, as it restokes the coals of a crowd that has finally caught light. Cancer Bats still look as full of beans as they did an hour ago, and it’s clear to see they won some committed followers this evening. Hell knows they worked for it.