Hi-Fi, Brisbane
Friday September 5, 2014 :
I’m writing this whilst waiting for a bus at 1:00 in the morning, in a shirt that has more than doubled its weight in sweat (not mine), on a phone that seems to be water-damaged (again, the sweat). I can’t hear a thing and I’m almost certain that my left eye will be black by the morning, but my god was it worth it. Devildriver have become one of the bigger names in metal these days, so expectations walking in were high and were well and truly met.
After Whitechapel produced a crushingly heavy set with enough bass-drops to embarrass some of the older member of the crowd (see ‘Brown note’), California groove-metal legends Devildriver took the stage.
Somewhere between trying to keep my own balance and holding up the shirtless character next to me who was perspiring enough to create his own uninhabitable lake, singer Dez Fafara, through his LED-lit retro mic cued up the band to roll into the crowd classic ‘Head onto Heartache (Let Them Rot)’ and all hell broke loose. This was followed by the more recent ‘Gutted’ and double-kick-heavy ‘Not all Who Wonder are Lost’.
The floor section of the Hi-Fi is not ideally set up for mass pits, (it turns out stairs can be very disruptive to a mob’s momentum, who’d of thought?). So after taking part in what was possibly the smallest, yet most enthusiastic wall of death known to metal, my shirt was drenched, a lost cause, so a sweat-rag it became.
The night then peaked with the band’s anthemic cover of Awolnation’s ‘Sail’ (if you haven’t yet heard it, I definitely recommend having a listen), sending hundreds into a mass karaoke session, with perfectly-timed headbanging and fist-throwing to accompany.
All-in-all it was a great night, the kind of gig that sometimes you just need in order to get a bit primitive and maybe swing an elbow or two. It also marked the second time the groove-masters have been to Oz this year and I’m sure anyone who was at the gig is praying it was not the last.
Reviewer: Thomas Peasley
Photographer: Barry Schipplock
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