To be honest I hadn't even heard of Midnight until the tour was announced, even though they're on Fenriz' Band of the Week list. But I checked them out and liked what I heard.
Anyway, I arrived at the venue in time to see one of the support bands, Bulletbelt, who are apparently reasonably popular in NZ these days. They describe themselves as some kind of crossover between black metal and thrash, and they were actually reasonably impressive. I mean, I'm almost never impressed by support bands. They had an interesting sound; the bass was very prominent and bright, kind of like how it is in Iron Maiden. I have to say their thrash parts were very good, the black metal parts not so much. If they got a different vocalist and only did the thrash bits I'd say they'd be great, but then I'm mainly interested in thrash these days so I'm probably biased.
After their set I checked out the merch table, and scored Midnight's limited edition hand-numbered tour 7" (every touring band should do this!) and a Midnight patch for my jacket, then went outside to stow them safely in my car.
Midnight arrived on stage suddenly. They don't have a elaborate stage show, but they get a lot of effect out of those hoods they wear, and they had a lot of energy, getting right up the front of the stage and into the audience's faces; ramming the necks of their guitars into the crowd.
By the second song the mosh pit was in full swing. It was only about 3 rows deep (there were probably only 100 people at the show), and everyone was in good spirits. A couple of people tried to crowd surf, but it kind of ended with them going nowhere and then getting put down again due to there being no crowd to surf on, and thankfully they gave up.
During Violence on Violence a young guy attempted a stage dive, unfortunately due the aforementioned only 3-row deep mosh pit, he went right over the pit and landed heavily on the floor. I went to the bathroom soon after that and he was in there. "That was an epic dive man" I said to him. He disagreed. Everyone in the bathroom was laughing at him.
The show went quickly. The singer reminded me of Fat Mike from NOFX when he'd say stuff like "I can't believe you guys came out to see these crappy songs". I'd checked on setlist.fm before the show to see what sort of setlist they would have, and knew it was only gonna be about half an hour long. About the second to last song was when the singer decided to smash a bottle into the crowd, which was quite close to hitting me. Some people did get hit. Not a good look exactly but very dangerous and rock'n'roll. In the last song the guitarist ripped all the strings off his guitar and threw them into the crowd. I got one as a souvenir.
After the show, some guy told me he'd been cut by the broken bottle, and seemed to think it was weird that someone near him had been complaining about getting glass in their eye. And some other people were complaining about the short set. But I was happy. It's not often that interesting underground metal bands come to NZ, and if they do they're usually boring grindcore/death metal shit.
setlist @ setlist.fm
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5 years ago
