Live Review: Norma Jean, Belle Haven, Bayharbour, She Cries Wolf, Dire Wolf

With a public holiday only hours away, everyone’s trying to get good and liquored up before the clock strikes midnight and Good Friday makes everything decidedly less good. And what better soundtrack for a pre-public holiday piss-up than gnarly hardcore. Atmospheric doomcore outfit Dire Wolf are the first band to provide some live soundtrack to the evening’s beer drinking. And quite a soundtrack it is; between the meaty deathcore slams and hardcore chug-a-lug, there are enough slow and heavy jams to bang one’s head into the lip of a plastic beer cup.

Gold Coast’s She Cries Wolf are up next and sound hellbent on raising the tempo of the evening’s proceedings. The band’s angular riffs grind out of the P.A. and the front of the pit starts moving about. Afforded only a short set, She Cries Wolf deserve more time to showcase some of the cuts from their recently released debut album, Divorce.

Like Darkest Hour’s promising kid brother, Brisbane five-piece Bayharbour take to the stage as the last of the local acts gracing the bill this evening. They’ve only been on the scene for a relatively short while, but Bayharbour could be big. Hell, the right kind of merch designs and a judicious implementation of clean vocals and they’re basically The Amity Affliction.

As beers flow freely and one collective eye remains on that midnight liquor ban, Melbourne’s Belle Haven get the opportunity to do their thing as the main support. As local post-hardcore aficionados anxiously await the band’s debut long-player, their set only serves as kindling that fuels this desire. Considered one moment and furiously unhinged the next, Belle Haven’s tunes are like opening a hardcore Pandora’s Box.

The cult of Norma Jean has only continued to grow since they were last on Australian stages back in 2013. Everyone's stokedness levels are raging as the dudes get up before the already sweaty throngs crowded around Crowbar’s pit. As they blast through a lauded back catalogue of joints, Absentimental: Street Clam and The Entire World Is Counting On Me, And They Don’t Even Know It among them, the crowd goes pretty much batshit crazy; there are crowd surfs and mic grabs all over the front of the pit. Crowbar seems the perfect venue for Norma Jean; the devoted faithful pack the front and get more involved in the show than the regular club usually allows them and as the band work through Wrongdoers cuts The Potter Has No Hands and Sword In Mouth, Fire Eyes, it feels like everything everyone wants from a Norma Jean show. Watching the band tonight is a sweaty, intimate orgy of dudebro-ness, exactly the kind of dudebro orgy that Jesus died on the cross for. Fuckin’ good one Jesus.