Live Review: Converge, Old Man Gloom & The Fevered

The Jane Don'ts have stayed at home tonight and The Hi-Fi is bustling with anticipation as locals The Fevered take to the stage. Something of the go-to band when an international show of the extreme music persuasion rolls through town at the moment, the time playing good stages to decent crowds has helped the band's live performance immeasurably. There's a real confidence at play as they rip through numbers that sound like Gothenburg metal getting into a fistfight with d-beat hardcore.

Roughly a minute passes in between the time Aaron Turner says 'Yes... Hello' to the audience and Old Man Gloom's first note of music. The space between the two points is filled with feedback and pedal manipulation. Beyond showing what noise Turner and fellow metal/hardcore vets Nate Newton and Cave In's Caleb Scofield are capable of creating, it's a nice metaphor for the dichotomy between OMG and tonight's headliners. When Converge operate within the tropes of modern hardcore because, well, they basically made them standard operating procedure, Old Man Gloom are unattached to any sound or scene, and are delightfully freeform in their underground obscurity. The four-piece's set is a sometimes swirling, sometimes harsh noisescape where strains of USBM, glitchy post-rock, down-tuned doom metal and prog-influenced rock comes together to, slowly, loudly, pulverise a room waiting for the headliner's lightning quick, firebomb hardcore.

The crowd seems to take four steps closer to the stage as soon as Converge, arguably the most influential hardcore/metalcore band to emerge from the dying days of the last millennium, hit the stage...'Hit the stage' is actually a misnomer – Converge explode like a goddamn nailbomb when they're front and centre. Vocalist Jacob Bannon is pacing across the stage like he's looking to fight the entire audience at the same time, you can't even tell bassist Nate Newton has just played a set with Old Man Gloom and drummer Ben Koeller is pounding the living daylights out of his kit, creating a furious backbeat that fills out the entire room. A band renowned for the energy they bring to just about every stage they touch, the energetic catharsis captured by the quartet tonight is par for the course, but what's truly spectacular about the set is how the band transform the material, particularly the title track and Trespasses from latest LP All We Love We Leave Behind. An album defined by guitarist Kurt Ballou's tinny tones, when Converge explore the material live the songs sound so much fuller, and with all the heft of classic Converge the All We Love… numbers brutalise the crowd. It's another superb showing from Converge, and there's scarcely a person leaving The Hi-Fi without a shit-eating grin plastered across their face.