The Ocean/Burst, Sheffield Corporation 12/3/09
Posted by Sam on 13 Mar 2009 at 05:10 pm | Tagged as: Music
I haven’t done a gig review for a while so here’s a quick one:
I missed the two support acts but apparently they weren’t anything spectacular. The Ocean started with a big puff of smoke and some vaguely generic naval-warfare themed video backdrop, and proceeded to execute their particularly epic brand of progressive sludge with exceptional tightness. The smoke was certainly a bit too heavy and wasn’t too far way from becoming a bit Spinal Tap in places, but it didn’t seem to phase the band. They produced a great performance but with the short (45min) set focussing on the more bludgeoning tracks in their repertoire, and the fact that they had lost a vocalist and a keyboard/samples guy compared to when I last saw them (at Hellfest last year), I felt it didn’t quite match expectations.
Burst came out to a noticeably thinner crowd, a few people obviously came to see The Ocean and left straight after they finished; they certainly missed out there as Burst totally upstaged their tour partners with a less brutal, but more cerebrally tantalising display of exceedingly progressive hardcore. Opening with the epic ‘(We Watched) The Silver Rain’, Burst had sound issues at the start but luckily it improved significantly by the 3rd song or so. With a stripped-down feel to their show compared to The Ocean’s smoke and mirrors, they effortlessly skipped through a large selection of tracks from the awesomely prog-tastic ‘Lazarus Bird’ album, along with a few older ones. They were really relaxed onstage and looked like they enjoyed it massively despite the reduction in audience size (which wasn’t exactly huge to begin with). Their main vocalist was pretty funny too, cracking a few jokes and seemingly greatly amused by the ‘balcony stage’ in the Corp 3rd room.
My only complaints were that there should have been only one support act on this double-headline tour, and Burst clearly should have reversed their set list so that ‘…Silver Rain’ (my favourite song of theirs) got the full benefit of the vastly improved sound quality at the end.