The 100 or so darkly clad youths started to inch forward towards the stage like hungry dung beetles towards the object of their choice, as the time came for some Monday night metal. Fallen To provided slow melodic and sometimes eerie build ups to songs followed by a crescendo of crashing riffs, thundering drum beats and swift and high pitched vocals it was just what the crowd wanted to thrash out those Monday blues. Front man James Norris threw himself into songs such as ‘Kill The Bitch’ and “Bovine Calm”. Despite the uncompromising crudeness that is depicted in the title of the former song, James’ clean cut complexion and good boy at heart persona meant that the songs were not terribly convincing or hard hitting, as you would expect good metal songs to be.

The performance of the evening had to be that of drummer Jez Marshall, whose boisterous skin thrashing was reminiscent of the great Chad Smith, and helped lift some of the songs to another level and kept those heads banging. James Norris did his best to ensure that the crowd went wild with a typical metal mosh towards the end. Although, the fact that he had to spend time explaining to the crowd what to do, which was basically to form to lines either side of the room and run into each other. This was as choreographed as any ballet, everyone knows that a good mosh is achieved by sporadic crowd exuberance at being carried away by the sheer class of the music. Unfortunately, the standard was not high enough tonight.

David Adair