Live Review: The Amity Affliction, Chelsea Grin, Stick To Your Guns, In Hearts Wake

First up on tonight's camo-clad Riverstage is Byron Bay metalcore group In Hearts Wake. Having been kicking it since 2006, the thousands of kids in early attendance are surely representative of the largest Australian show these guys have ever played… a sentence quite possibly valid for all the bands. Save for smashing their new single, Skydancer, up second, the band plays a super tight set entirely from last year's Divination album.

California's Stick To Your Guns begin with the title track to last year's Diamond album, from which the majority of their set is taken, surprisingly even avoiding the hits of their past. While they certainly have everyone's attention, there's probably not quite as much of an overt outpouring of energy from the crowd as one might expect. Either way the band give it their all from start to finish.

Chelsea Grin take the heaviness up a notch from the word go. Kicking it off with their older hit, Recreant, the American group is unashamedly deathcore for the most part, and even those not familiar with their catalogue can tell when the next breakdown is going to happen. Showing off their more progressive inclinations with newer songs such as Lilith and Don't Ask, Don't Tell, this is an awesome band built for massive pits while still able to shred their worth in metal technicality.

It's an incredible feat that locals The Amity Affliction manage to just keep getting bigger, and tonight they prove their worth in gold. With a set spanning all three of the group's albums, the 3000-plus strong audience is uniformly mesmerised and adoring. With every member completely on top of their game, and every second audience member screaming every word back at them, vocalist Joel Birch comments that it's “fucking amazing” to be playing completely sober after having been “fucking wasted” the last time the band performed at the Riverstage. Disrupting their otherwise enthralling momentum with a slightly awkward cover of Lana Del Rey's Too Legit To Quit, the eventual encore of Open Letter provides a suitably epic end to a fairly epic evening.