Rave Magazine - Brisbane Street Press - Slayer / Mastodon / Minus Life

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Slayer / Mastodon / Minus Life

Tuesday, 24 April 2007

Photo: Aaron Sammut

Riverstage - Thursday April 19

As a seemingly interminable stream of black t-shirt-clad folk flows en masse towards the relative serenity surrounding the QUT Riverstage, local dark, melodic metallers Minus Life heroically rattle out their exceedingly short set to a half-empty outdoor venue. What the lads’ set lacks in sound quality (with some awful mic cutouts tarnishing the normally captivating vocals) is more than made up for in energy, which the youngsters up front in the all-ages section more than return in kind.

Photo: Aaron Sammut

After a short break, Mastodon lower their collective head and charge onto the stage, rumbling through a veritable stampede of awesome tracks from their epic newie, Blood Mountain, along with choice cuts from press favourite Leviathan, and Jurassic number March Of The Fire Ants. Musically they are faultless, with a guitar sound to die for and a tight, perfectly realised display of their stoner-meets-hardcore-meets-old-school-metal-meets-prog sound which seemingly lumbers straight over the heads of much of the crowd, who are clearly here for the other band – what the hell are you thinking people? This is good heavy metal music.

Photo: Aaron Sammut

Finally, Slayer march out to do their thing, gifting the supremely enthusiastic folk of Brisbane with a well performed but strikingly uneven set comprised of a fair whack of the classic thrash standards that made them such a great band, along, of course, with a ‘generous’ dash of the nu-thrash drivel that made them a not-so-great band in the last decade. The 1-2-3 punch of early tunes Die By the Sword, Show No Mercy and Captor Of Sin is the clear highlight with one or two Christ Illusion tunes also going some way towards dragging this reviewer in. The vaguely Nuremberg Rally-esque response to everything these guys do onstage leads me to believe I was perhaps virtually alone in my nitpicking little Mastodon-worshipping shell. Bah, humbug.

SHAUN NANCARROW

Comments (2)

1. Written by j, on 24-04-2007 14:20
Ha ha! thats a classic.

I felt pretty alone when dissing Disturbed before Korn last year... the crowd were all into mimicking those animal noises; a heavy-metAL playschool!

Good review mate, wish i was there too

2. Written by Sector, on 24-04-2007 15:01
what?.. no mention of 'Seasons in the Abyss'.. Mastodon were good, Slayer was better.. don't be fooled into believing otherwise kiddies

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