 Judges Oscar Rangel, Jon Asher, Dan Hand, Andrew Epstein was Rivers Run Red, who entered the stage with each member wearing a different coloured sweat suit, it looked like a metal version of the Wiggles. As far as their music goes, it was pretty standard death metal with gutteral vocals and machine gun riffs. The band's performance was solid, but they didn't bring their A-game with the stage presence. Frontman Silvestro Lo Presti would do the occasional few headbangs, but guitarists Massino Taglieri and Andrew La Porta and bassist Matthew Trojan just stood in one spot on the stage just slightly bobbing their heads. Solid performance, just the stage presence needs work. Third band was Apokalyptik Warrior who had a bit of a Spinal Tap moment at the start of their set. As SS Ramsay started the first riff of the first song and got the crowd fired up, his amp head died, leaving him with no sound coming out of his amp, and they had to replace the cooked head with another head. Once the issue was fixed, the band fired right back into the song and their whole set went off without a hitch. Tom Gervais from Midnight Malice was filling in for bassist Denise Samuelson because she is expecting a baby real soon, so congratulations to Denise. The band's set consisted of a lot of fast thrashy songs and a few groovers. They hold the record for longest set, which consisted of about 9-10 songs, but it still lasted the standard 25 minutes. While their performance was great, there were a couple of flaws about their set. The first one being that Ramsay's guitar drowned out his vocals and the drums. The bass was the only other | Journalist: Alex Stojanovic Photographer: Navneet Johal Date of show: March 27, 2015 The Wacken Battle Toronto edition graced the Bovine once again for round 4 on a cold Friday night. I was feeling a little under the weather this night, but I had a great time. First band of the night Black Eve was second up, enticing the fans with their corpse paint as they were setting up. Frontman John Davis' makeup resembles Darth Maul with the red and black design. Their sound comes pretty close to Amon Amarth with the compelling, heavy and melodic riffs and the low gutteral vocals. Davis' vocals sound pretty similar to Johan Hegg's You can also hear a tinge of black metal in their music. They were also the first band to have mosh pits going. At the point when the band were about to perform their last song, they unfortunately got cut off to avoid going over time. Overall, very solid performance. |
thing that could be heard through the guitar, and Ramsay's solos lacked precision and sound sloppy, especially during the fast songs. Pits were continuous during their set, and they also hold the record for having the most pits of the night.
| Olde, from Malton, closed the night off with a set of slightly slower tempos. It's easy to assume that their biggest influence is Black Sabbath, because of the big doom-y Tony Iommi style riffs, and the drumming was pretty similar to Bill Ward's, but Doug McLarty's vocals were way different than Ozzy or Dio's. Guitarist Chris Hughes was absent from the show, so they had guitarist Dave Joseph filling in. The riffs were very solid and groovy, but the amount of distortion coming through the amps made the riffs sound messy, which kind of irks me. Aside from the small flaw, I thoroughly enjoyed their performance. | Call Of The Wild stormed the stage next. If you took a bit of power metal, and combined it with the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, you got Call Of The Wild. Their whole set was a highlight, but I'll name a few of the big points. The guitar partnership of Cyndi Zhang and Tom Stanley was one of the set's biggest highlights. Their soulful, chaotic and precise twin-harmony leads and solos and exciting riffs wowed the crowd and were pure ear-candy to me. Power Serg's vocals were very melodic and he had great control of his vocals. Chris Maniac's drum performance really caught my eye. He has a great sense of groove, feel, and great overall flow. Being a drummer myself, I'm always attracted to the drummer's performance. |
Wacken Metal Battle Canada 2015 national updates here.
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