Live Reviews : Testament & King Parrot @ The Espy Gershwin Room, Melbourne 25/02/2014

Soundwave Festival dominated Australia in February and early March once again, bringing together close to 90 bands for the whole tour, mostly being internationals. Despite the fact that several bands dropped out of the festival (some within a week of the first show) and financial nightmares causing the Perth leg of the festival to be the last one ever, the festival was successful once again.

As usual, for those who don’t get enough out of 30-40 minute sets of their favourite bands on the festival (or those who don’t like the festival at all), there are always some big sideshows on the east-coast of Australia during the 5 day break of the Soundwave Festival shows. One night during the tour in Melbourne, it attracted hundreds of thrashers to the Dark Roots of the Gersh (better known as the Gershwin Room) at The Espy, for Bay Area legends Testament.

Testament had big competition that night, with fellow Soundwave metal giants Mastodon, Baroness and Gojira packing out the Palace Theatre not too far away. But I was pleasantly surprised to see the Gershwin Room completely packed for a night of thrash.
To be honest, I’m glad that I didn’t have to see Newsted on the show due to his last-minute cancellation. What made that even better was Melbourne’s feathered grindcore maniacs King Parrot being announced as Newsted’s replacement.

After seeing King Parrot several times over the past year (more recently on the Havok tour in Geelong), I’m familiar with how their set list goes, and I know their stage antics. So seeing this band was no surprise to me (yet still exciting as always), but it was a surprise to the unsuspecting Testament diehards who hadn’t heard of them. Their build-up intro of feedback and shit-talking transitioned into ‘Dead End Bender’, the song they recently filmed a genius music video for. Dead End was a perfect intro to their always-chaotic set, and it was followed by innovating vocalist Matt Young exposing his arse to the front row during the ‘Cold Steel Probe’ intro.

However, even with a room that was close to full, it took a while for the chaotic stage presence of Youngy and smartarse comments from bassist/crowd heckler Slatts to get the crowd moving. It wasn’t until half-way through the set that the crowd started to get into it more, and the band started to rip through album favourites like ‘Lizard’, ‘Bozo’ and ‘The Stench of Hardcore Pub Trash’. The new song they played ‘Hell Comes Your Way’ had newcomers of the band chanting the title and banging their heads, and they had a pit going for the last two songs ‘Psychotherapy & Valium’ and ‘Shit on the Liver’.

The full-time addition of legendary Australian drummer Matt ‘Skitz’ Sanders has proven to be the perfect choice for the band, especially since they’re a band heavily influenced by Skitz’ old band Damaged. And the last couple of times I’ve seen them, the songs were played faster than ever.

As usual, King Parrot was given a longer set than they could play. They had an hour time slot when their entire music catalogue only goes for less than 40 minutes. So when they finished, it made the wait for the mighty Testament even longer. It would have been nice to see them start earlier and have a longer set, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. It took almost an hour of waiting before the room went dark and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ intro began. The giant Chuck Billy walks out on the stage and asks the crowd “Are you ready to rise up?!” And the crowd clearly was, as a frenzy of moshers, headbangers and crowdsurfers rose the horns up to ‘Rise Up’, the opener of their latest album ‘Dark Roots of Earth’.

One of the best things about a Testament show (or any band like this) is that the newer songs go off just as much as the old songs. Even as a band that’s been around for 30 years and released 10 albums that don’t all sound the same, they can still perform a lot of songs from their last two albums without people the majority of the crowd feeling bored and just wanting to hear the classics. With that being said, the whole set was a 50/50 mix of newer songs and classics, going from newer stuff like ‘More Than Meets the Eye’ and ‘True American Hate’ to classics like ‘The Preacher’ and ‘Into the Pit’.

I’ve said this plenty of times before, and I’ll say it again; if Satan existed, I can imagine him being voiced by Chuck Billy. From his yells and melodic singing to his monstrous death metal growls, Chuck has a giant voice and stage presence like no other metal frontman. Most of the night he sounded spot on during the songs, but there were a couple of songs he sung in a lower key than usual, such as the newer song ‘Native Blood’. Since he didn’t do this for any of the other Dark Roots of Earth songs they performed (which were in the same key), I was a little confused.

Aside from the vocals, Chuck Billy is also one of the best air-guitarists in metal. While he wasn’t singing, Chuck was air-guitaring with his special microphone stand (which was very close to how the actual guitar riffs were played) and trying to steal the spotlight from Skolnick while he was playing solos. At one point during the ‘Dark Roots of Earth’ solo, he was taking guitar picks from Skolnick’s mic stand to air-guitar with, and throw into the audience.

Closing with ‘The Haunting’ and ‘Over the Wall’, it wasn’t long before Testament came back out for their encore, bringing some of their heaviest post-80s material. ‘D.N.R. (Do Not Resuscitate)” and a crushing, slowed down rendition of ‘Three Days in Darkness’ kept the heads banging, followed by the title track of their 2008 album ‘The Formation of Damnation’.

Although I have many good things to say about the bands, there was one thing that left me and many others disappointed with the show, and that was how bad the sound was; especially for Testament. With Alex Skolnick panned to the left speaker and Eric Peterson panned to the right, most of the time you could only hear one guitar or the other. Actually, you could hardly hear the guitars at all, because they weren’t turned up loud enough. The drums (kicks especially) and bass overpowered the mix, except for when Skolnick switched to his lead tone to play solos. ‘The Atomic Clock’ Gene Hoglan might be one of the best drummers in metal, but not being able to hear some of thrash metals finest riffs was disappointing.

But instead of ending this on a bad note, I will say that both bands put on an exciting, memorable performance that night at The Espy, and I was lucky enough to see both of them again a few days later at Soundwave Festival in Melbourne, with a few thousand more people in attendance, and a shorter set.

Testament set list:
1. Rise Up
2. More Than Meets the Eye
3. The Preacher
4. Native Blood
5. True American Hate
6. Dark Roots of Earth
7. Into the Pit
8. Practice What You Preach
9. The New Order
10. The Haunting
11. Over the Wall
12. D.N.R. (Do Not Resuscitate)
13. 3 Days in Darkness
14. The Formation of Damnation

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