It’s a cold December night in Southampton and the concluding date on the debut Cane Hil UK Headline tour. The show is taking place at the Iconic Joiners venue and also has INDEVTH & The Gloom in the Corner along for support.
There is a real buzzy vibe in the air tonight. You only really get this type of atmosphere at shows of this size and for a band like Cane Hill. It also helps that fans have been waiting 8 years for this tour to materialize.
INDEVTH gets things off to a brutal start. Their brand of aggro beatdown hardcore wakes the crowd up nice and early. The pit starts immediately & sees more body parts flying around than a lively game of operation. They are the perfect opening act for this type of occasion. Super heavy, super fun and effectively engaged with the crowd. A band that wasn’t anywhere near my radar before tonight that are now very much on it and I’m interested to see more from them.
The Gloom In The Corner are more closely aligned with Cane Hill in terms of sound and style, they still bring their own flavour to the evening. Frontman Mikey Arthur is both hilarious and ferocious as he conducts tonight’s enthusiastic crowd into bouncing around with an energy that would put several kangaroos in a Red Bull factory to shame. They are a much more vicious and precise entity live than they are on record. Tracks like Black Rot & Bleed You Out take on new life in front of a more than up for it crowd. New song Assasination Run is a tantalising tease of what is next and the closing salvo of The Jericho Protocol sees their set come to a frenzied end.
Cane Hill are coming into this tour on an absolute high. Their latest album A Piece Of Me I Never Let You Find is the finest of their career and this tour is in celebration of its release. Opening tonight’s set with The Midnight Sun, Cane Hill did not come to mess around, following up with a crushing Power of the High they sound as tight & as focused as they ever have. With that said, there is a deftness and lightness to their performance. Joking with the audience between songs, declaring tonight’s setlist to be the “sluttiest one they could put together” before playing a bunch of horny swamp songs that would definitely be on Shrek’s sex playlist.
Cane Hill are one of the finest bands in the modern metalcore scene and it’s not just because they can peel off songs like Permanence in Sleep,Too Far Gone, Drowning Therapy & Blood & Honey with ease. It’s so much more than that, it’s their ability to make a room full of 200 people feel like a room full of a 1000. There’s an intimacy and intensity to their live shows that very few bands can capture naturally without resorting to bells & whistles. Elijah Witt is a natural frontman, as he stalks the stage, managing to get the crowd to sing, shout and stop/start with nothing more than a hand gesture in some instances.
There are moments throughout tonight where the frontmen from each of the supports make cameos throughout the other sets. Mikey Arthur comes out during Lord of Flies and even that feels freewheeling and just like pals having fun rather than something contrived and planned. Being a solid live band is a feat in itself, but being one that is so good and so engaging while also managing to feel loose and fluid is another thing entirely.
Shows like tonight feel special. These are those moments years down the line, that you tell people you were there for. Cane Hill are band that is light years ahead of many of their peers both as songwriters & live performers. What we witnessed here tonight is the band obliterating the glass ceiling and announcing themselves as the next big act to watch. Armed with these new songs and this kind of power live, nothing is going to be able to stop them, and this will be the last time you’ll be able to get up close to them. Next time you see them the venues will be much bigger.
10/10
