Live Review: At The Drive In

An onstage time of 8.45pm for the headline act suggests a set length of epic proportions and we settle in for the ride. At The Drive In are one of those bands you can always totally rely on to constantly blow your face off. Their technical virtuosity is next-level and there's also that element of danger continually bubbling below the surface with every hitch-kick, mad air-jump, mic-stand twirl and death drop from the frontman with the killer head of hair, Cedric Bixler-Zavala.

At The Drive In's songs are vicious and dense, you can really feel them ripping through your core. There's also something elegant about this band and they dress to impress with an all-black theme. Bixler-Zavala's delivery of Invalid Litter Dept is at once irate, exasperated and moving. The refrain ("Dancing on the corpses' ashes") gets us every time. Guitarist/producer of At The Drive In's latest Inter Alia album, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, is a class act and we welcome his relentless riff attacks. Six tracks from At The Drive In's new album are included in tonight's setlist, which some may argue is too many, but this probably contributes to the overall verve of their playing. Main set closer Governed By Contagions is an absolute beast of a track with carnival-esque riffs held down by Tony Hajjar's robust drumming.

When the band return to the stage for their encore, Bixler-Zavala recalls a previous gig At The Drive In played at Hi-Fi Bar (now Max Watt's) when they were on the Big Day Out tour way back in 2001, which some members of Rammstein attended. Post-show, Rammstein visited At The Drive In in their dressing room and, as Bixler-Zavala hilariously recounts while putting on a German accent that sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger at times, said to the band: "It was very good. You had so much energy for first five minutes then, what happened?" Bixler-Zavala tells us he then retorted: "There was no fuckin' AC in the place, Rammstein! You guys get to hide behind dildos and fuckin' Mad Max shit, we're just up here... Trying to do what we're doin'!" After thanking us for coming along "and being obsessed all these years", we have lift-off as At The Drive In finally kick into the aural assault of One Armed Scissor. The packed stalls watch reverently except for a moshing section front and centre that now detonates as we rock along to the song we've all been dying to hear: "Get aWAAAAY!/Get aWAAAAY!" There are lots of crazy single arms slicing the space among crowd members.

Is it possible At The Drive In's time apart has strengthened their live show? This scribe sure thinks so; it's as if they're re-energised, feel privileged to present this material to us live and have just cut through the bullshit to focus on their performance. Sure, we miss Jim Ward at times, particularly his powerful vocal contributions, but such are the chops of his replacement Keeley Davis (former guitarist for Sparta, the band Ward formed back in 2001 when At The Drive In first disbanded) that the original guitarist's absence isn't felt too strongly.