I walked into The Zoo just in time to catch the lost song from Helm. They had an interesting blend of shoegaze-y textural work meets Mastodon style riffage. Like if Baroness were slower and sweeter. I’m embarrassed I didn’t catch more. I didn’t really know what to expect from the night and the next act beat any guesses I had. The Algorithm played an 8-bit version of Through The Fire And Flames as entry music before it glitched out into the band’s performance.

They were just a two piece, half British drummer and half French electronic musician with a laptop and a controller. Not something you usually see at a metal gig. They quickly rolled through several styles of electronic music made heavy from club style dance music to gabba and back again. Like digital hardcore on acid. The Frenchman was one of the most fervent electronic performers I’d ever seen. He’d be singing along to vocal samples, pumping up the crowd during the dance sections and then hot-knobbing like a boss when things got heavy. Although it looked like he was just playing with filters for the most part, the way he threw his head around you would’ve thought he was recreating heavy metal. The ‘digital head bang’ if you will. While the performance was great, the music wasn’t quite as interesting. It had its fair share of cool moments but the majority of it was constant 8th note electro lines on repeat with typical half-time cymbal drumming to back it up. To top off my opinion of them, they incorporated a bastardisation of Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger into a song, but maybe I’m just an elitist.

Then came Twelve Foot Ninja. They opened with red lights and chainsaw sounds courtesy of their recent film clip (check it out if you like gore or Sweeney Todd) and the crowd let out a medium sized cheer. They launched into a song but the first thing I noticed was the invisible keys player. God damned backing tracks. It never really works the right way when full bands play to backing tracks, it seems weirdly inauthentic and there’s no room for spontaneity or margin for error. The second thing I noticed was how thin their guitar sounds were, so thin that when they broke into breakdown style chugging patterns (which was often) it felt like when a pre-pubescent boy tries to death growl. Every so often when the backing track wasn’t doing it for him, the guitarist would dial in an ‘acoustic patch’ on his pedal board and play his electric with a vaguely acoustic sounding tone. It was like something you’d do as a joke during band practice. The singer traipsed around the stage like he was lost, trying to pass off reaching his hand out during high notes and pointing the mic at the audience as crowd interaction. On the plus side, they did have some rather nice vocal harmonies, and some pretty chords when they decided to do funky backbeat sections. But then they also did a reggae song. The best part was Ain’t That A Bitch, their latest single, the crowd got especially riled up for it and all of Twelve Foot Ninja’s strengths came to play in the same song. I was hoping that they would come across better live, but they really didn't. Hopefully the djent-y faux-prog craze comes to an end soon.

- Krishan Meepe