Live

Flood of Red, Circle of One, Dead Against the Rest

Huw Evans 04/10/2009

Dead Against The Rest started off the night with their classic rock stylings. Both singers have classic rock voices but I couldn't pick up one coherent lyric in the entire set. These guys obviously love what they do and have fun at the same time, which is just as well because they're not going anywhere with their music.

The second band of the night was Circle Of One. Although the guitarists were technically excellent the songs didn't stick at all. The guitarists had some excellent riffs and some eye-popping solos but at times the rhythm section was looser than a lady of the night's knicker elastic. The main event was Flood Of Red. These guys have been around for a few years now and while other bands have gone further, Flood Of Red have stayed at the same level. There's nothing essentially wrong with their music, I think they've just been sucked into the whole genre/scene thing and sound just like most other bands in this style. They started the set with Home, Run (1997) (released on the 5th of Oct), a song they have an acoustic version of on their Myspace. It's just the kind of thing you would expect from this band, with vocalist Jordan Spiers as mournful as ever singing about black clouds and rain. Behind the wall of sound they produced, I couldn't really distinguish any other songs, though they did sound professional. Home, Run (1997) has a breakdown which has twin vocals and sounds great, but more importantly different. I think they could do with stripping back more of the wall of sound just to keep things fresher.

Two songs before the end, a mosh pit broke out down the front, which looked a bit odd given the small Sunday night turn out. I can't say I really saw anything different in Flood Of Red than there is in any other band of this genre but they seemed to instil something in the 'mini moshers' down the front. To close the night, a big bass drum on a stand appeared in the crowd from somewhere, as did a snare. After the singer had been dabbling with singing amongst the crowd below, there began a marching drum percussion to round things off. All members excluding the bassist grabbed sticks and banged drums in a marching rhythm that sounded quite impressive as a closer. However, I saw The Xcerts do something similar to end their set a while ago with the front man smacking a snare drum to death in the crowd. I'm not saying this is a bad thing in any way, but if a bit of variation is what they want then why not do it throughout the set with the songs instead of slapping a rather obvious gimmick at the end?