Band: Drowning Pool
Support: Revoker and Fozzy
Venue: Garage, London
Date: 17/04/2013
Tonight’s show was due to take place at the Electric Ballroom but was moved last minute to the Garage. This is a great call for the intimacy of the music and if you want to get down and sweaty in the mosh pit, but not so good on the first day of sunshine that England has seemed to have all year. It’s definitely going to be a hot one tonight!
Welsh rockers Revoker open up tonight’s proceedings and they certainly don’t want to just blend into the background of an ‘opening act’. From the moment the guitars burst out the opening riffs of ‘Thief’ right through to the last screams as the band leave after closer ‘Born To Be An Outlaw’ they own the stage. Those who came just for a few drinks early are drawn in and bop their heads as they drink their pints. The band rock their way through a six track set and provide the perfect opening to the night.
Chris Jericho may be one of the most versatile men around at the moment, he was in New York not more than a few weeks ago for Wrestlemania and now he’s touring Europe in support of Fozzy. We caught them a few days earlier in Brighton: check out what we thought here . And whilst you’re there check out what happened when we chatted to Chris Jericho himself right here.
The venue seemed to empty out slightly before headliners Drowning Pool came onstage although we’re convinced that the front half of the venue are so tightly squished together that the capacity seems to have halved! For a lot of people Drowning Pool are what they’ve been waiting for. Jason Moreno is now the bands fourth vocalist but watching the band you wouldn’t think he’d only been a part of team Drowning Pool for less than a year.
Drowning Pool seem to be one of the few nu-metal bands to survive the genres almost disappearance and continue on as strong as they ever were. Jason’s vocals mix aggression, screams, growls with edgy melody and bring the band back together as a whole again. It doesn’t take long for the crowd to go mental during opener ‘Step Up’ and the tone of the evening is set. The band play a handful of tracks from brand new album ‘Resilience’ including ‘Die For Nothing’ and ‘One Finger and a Fist’. These are the tracks which vocally Jason sounds far more comfortable with- being his own tracks and not a version of a former members. The newer material fits perfectly in the middle of older tracks such as ‘Pity’ and ‘Tear Away’.
There isn’t a huge amount of banter between songs, but there’s never a quiet moment as the band blast from one song to another in midst of the screaming crowd. There’s one song though that everyone’s waiting for. One song we CAN NOT wait for. Naturally the entire crowd feel absolutely the same because the moment that the opening second of ‘Bodies’ kicks in the venue is a mass of screams, chants and literal bodies! Even those people in the back half of the crowd are screaming “there’s nothing wrong with me” in each others faces. It’s a beautiful sight how just one track can provoke so much feeling from a crowd. If people were unsure of Drowning Pool up until this moment then feelings have been changed and opinions altered. The band have still got it.
9/10
Reviewer: Rhian Westbury
