Sylosis At Relentless Garage
January 6th, 2010 by AdamComing straight from the ‘classic metal’ line of thinking Savage Messiah apparently choose to totally ignore any influences beyond the late 1980s. Normally this could be a recipe for disaster for anything but the most nostalgic of old school crowds, but tonight they pull off a storming set fuelled largely by the fact that these boys KNOW they can play. It’s not exactly breaking new ground but with vocals from the best end of the Hetfield/Mustaine ‘Yayeeeeeah!’ spectrum and a keen ear for mixing thunderous riffs with twiddly-but-not-tedious solos they’re the perfect band to get a party started. And the hair, so much hair…
Unfortunately the same enthusiasm can’t be carried over to South Wales boys Anterior. Coming from a similar vein as tonight’s headliners with their mix of old school thrashing and modern metal sensibilities there’s nothing notably wrong with the set, it just feels a little formulaic. They play hefty, competent, straight-up metal with the prerequisite breakdowns and rockstar poses in all the right places, and to their credit they do deal with some inane crowd heckling pretty admirably, but some kind of spark is needed if they’re ever going to progress beyond the mid-bill slot.
The early heaviness feels like easy listening once Ted Maul take to the stage with an almost intolerable, guttural noise incorporating grind, drum and bass and death metal. The audio torture hardly lets up in a barrage that only very occasionally allows glimpses of actual riffs and individual sounds. Despite the chaos it’s a spectacle to watch, flying dreads and drummed hairy chests akimbo. You get the feeling that they don’t give a flying fuck if they make any fans or not – an audience comment that the set was ‘like being raped’ probably only touches on their intended result.
Despite having only one album and a pair of EPs to their name Sylosis manage to slot more bar-raising anthems into their frantically paced fifty minutes than most other bands do with a decade’s back catalogue to work from. ‘Oath Of Silence’ and ‘Conclusion Of An Age’ display some awesome guitar harmonics, and Jamie Graham’s brutal vocal range sits nicely next to good old fashioned head-bang moments. The most impressive thing is the effortlessness with which they tear up the crowd, combining the song structures of old school metal with the hardcore aggression and technicality of more recent thrash and hardcore influences. It all ends in a spiralling wall of death to ‘Teras’, leaving no doubt that this is the start of something big: Sylosis are coming and they’re out for blood.
