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Punks, metal heads and the living dead are among the many that fill The Charlotte this warm Friday night. Three zombie girls shuffle through the crowd, sniffing out tasty young meat to feed upon on their way to the front. Apparently, the undead don't get out much.
The Charlottes stage is tiny and only about a foot off the ground. Local punk quartet A New Days Enemy cramp themselves together to deliver an inoffensive set of tunes, in places sounding like Rise Against, in others not a million miles from Rancid. It's good, but it's not as exciting as it should be.
Gallows are a group of very angry men. A hardcore/punk outfit from the South, they're dressed like an early Clash and sounding like The Bronx and At The Drive-In colliding. Skinny and tattooed, their singer sometimes seems a little too preoccupied with the ideas of fighting and spitting than is entirely necessary, encouraging everyone to punch him... "I'm skinny and ginger, what are you scared of?!" For the title track of their debut album 'Orchestra Of Wolves', the audience is asked to howl along in parts, which they do and are slowly won over by this aggressive gang.
It's late when the smell of rotting flesh engulfs the venue. Three of the zombies that make up Send More Paramedics amble on to the stage, whilst singer B'Hellmouth wanders aimlessly through the crowd to join them. Releasing a ferocious attack of fucked up thrash metal and hardcore, they leap around the stage, scissor kicking and screaming. The pit, mental from the word go, is a distorted tangle of souls, dead limbs flailing everywhere.
The sound resembles a bloody feast of Slayer and The Misfits butchered and buried in the same shallow grave, with amusing songs such as 'Cannibal' and 'Cranial Blowout'. At times it is difficult to see where the band end and the crowd begin. B'Hellmouth stands on the barrier before leaping, or possibly falling, into the pit below, taking down bodies as he falls to the floor and giving his prey the mic to scream into as they are consumed. A large portion of the set is made up of songs from the new album 'The Awakening', there is the mighty 'Everything Is Not Control' and 'Anthrophagi' which is a little more gentle on the ears. The final song of the evening is the anthemic 'Zombie Crew', lyrically summing up what the whole experience is about, "We're the rocking resurrected and we've come for your head, let's party like we're fuckin' dead". Considering these guys are dead, they're pretty damn lively. This is a band that must be seen live to appreciate and understand the whole concept, make them the soundtrack to your death!
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