REAL GONE GOES OUT: Lamb of God – Wembley Arena, London 3/11/2018

When Lamb of God headlined a cold January night at the Brixton Academy in 2014, their performance bordered on woeful. Bad sound, a short setlist and a lot of time spent talking between songs resulted in a massive disappointment. With hindsight, the night’s opening act wiped the floor with them. In an energetic half-hour slot, Huntress, fronted by the spirited Jill Janus, showed a lot of energy and a willingness to please the audience, obviously being more than aware of how hard it is to be a relatively unknown support band. After the revelation that Jill took her own life in August 2018, that set is now a memory to treasure. Lamb of God’s, not so much.

Wembley Arena is packed to the rafters this evening. The night’s event – headlined by Slayer, but also featuring Obituary, Anthrax and Lamb of God – is a metal fan’s dream. Obituary have shown themselves to be true professionals even as underdogs, and Anthrax – stalwarts of 80s thrash – have put on a really fun support slot, showing why they’ve retained their legendary status.

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AUTUMNWIND – Endless Fear

Autumnwind isn’t really a band; it’s a huge musical vision where its founder, Abdulrahman Abu Lail writes and plays everything. He uses this one man band as a vehicle for emotional outpouring, in his own words, as a way of “mind-describing” his own feelings through intensive music. This third album makes that theory even clearer by giving its five pieces of music titles which reflect emotive states. The results, as expected, are very heavy, though never so confrontational you’d struggle to listen or, indeed, want to shut off the feelings that Abdulrahman is keen to share.

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Watch the new video from Hostile

For the uninitiated, Hostile are a groove metal band from the West Midlands. Their work values a heavy riff in the tradition of Pantera and Lamb of God and their first two albums were produced by the legendary KK Downing. So far, they’ve shared stages with Megadeth, Soulfly and Machine Head and their career is going from strength to strength.

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SOUL DISSOLUTION – Nowhere EP

Formed in 2012, Belgian progressive/post black metal band Soul Dissolution have never been afraid to stretch the confines of black metal. Their 2018 album ‘Stardust’ mixed standard black metal ideas with some surprisingly melodic passages, resulting in something that often sounds like Drama crossed with a very extreme version of ‘Jester Race’ era In Flames, stretching extreme riffs into cold, bleak shapes.

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IMPELLITTERI – The Nature Of The Beast

Impelliteri’s tenth studio album ‘Venom‘ was a funny record. Not intentionally so, unfortunately, but lyrically it was so clichéd, it managed to make Judas Priest seem like they could be nominated for an Ivor Novello award at any given moment. Funnier still was Chris Impellitteri’s thinking behind the release: he supposedly wanted to “…create a metal record that would appeal to everyone… Even women”, apparently. Here was a man so stuck within a universe centred around 1984, he failed to even see how a lot of women were active on the metal scene at the time of its release. The very idea that some of them were even in bands might’ve just made his little head explode.

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