Review: Kreator/Arch Enemy, O2 Academy

Megadeth were always the most musically adept of thrash metal’s ‘Big Four’. And Marty Friedman was easily their best guitarist. But Marty seemed to turn his back on metal when he moved to Japan, married a cellist and became a TV presenter. Rather unexpectedly, he’s now back, back, back with intriguing Norwegian combo Shining, who’ve evolved from an instrumental acoustic jazz quartet to a full-on extreme avant-jazz-prog-metal act. The corkscrew-haired widdler is clearly having the time of his life. Why else would he fly halfway round to the world to play on just a couple of songs with a bottom-of-the-bill band on a pre-Christmas slog round the European circuit? It’s easy to understand why they only bring Marty on at the end though, as all eyes are immediately upon him. The obvious comparison here is avant-gardist John Zorn, though Shining deal less in free jazz than jazzed-up math metal. They climax with a total evisceration of King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man, whose barking-mad middle section sees honking Saxophonist/vocalist Jorgen Munkeby take on Marty’s magnificent shredding. Somewhere, Robert Fripp is nodding approvingly.

You’d have thought the pool of female vegans with the ability or inclination to emit blood-curdling death metal growls would be a fairly small one, but Swedish melodic death metallers Arch Enemy lost no time replacing the departed Angela Gossow with Alissa White-Gluz. Naturally, this has brought out our delightful internet friends the HATERZ in force. On this showing, they’re completely wrong, as usual. Gossow’s pleather boots were certainly tough to fill, but White-Gluz does so with confidence and aplomb, her multi-coloured hair flying in all directions as she rampages through openers War Eternal and Ravenous. But she’s equally comfortable with old favourites Dead Eyes See No Future and that thunderous empowerment anthem We Will Rise. “I can be anything/Anything I want to be” she bellows, and only a fool would deny it. The secret to Arch Enemy’s success is their welding of founding guitarist Michael Amott’s old-school melodic influences to brutal death metal without compromising either component. Set closer Nemesis sees Amott and newest recruit Jeff Loomis engage in a delirious twin guitar frenzy that is rewarded with tumultuous applause.

Founded back in the early ’80s, Essen’s veteran Kreator are a solid second-division thrash metal band and contemporaries of our very own Onslaught. Although this is technically a double-headlining show, they face quite a challenge following Arch Enemy. But while thrash may be less complex, it has few equals in whipping up an audience when played effectively. Kreator wisely avoid their dodgy ‘experimental’ period to concentrate on pure thrash old and new, all the way from Extreme Aggression to Phantom Antichrist, though audience exhaustion is clearly starting to set in by the time they reach Pleasure To Kill and a thrash makeover of Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast.

Anyone who wasn’t aware that frontman Mille Petrozza is an environmentally conscious fella (and another vegan) may have been a tad alarmed at the sight of a sandpaper-voiced German barking: “I want to see more violence! I want to see more chaos!” But to steal another band’s slogan, this was all good friendly violent fun, with fallen moshers dragged to their feet by their compatriots before they had a chance to be trampled to death in the circle pit.