Live Review: Coheed & Cambria + Thrice - O2 Brixton, 16/10/2022
O2 Brixton. Two legendary and one soon-to-be legendary bands. One big ol’ tour. And one hell of a show. Touché Amore, Thrice and Coheed and Cambria. What more could you want?
On paper, Coheed and Camria and Thrice doing a co-headline tour, with special guests Touché Amoré, seemed a little... unusual. The co-headline part was fine, with both musical giants benefitting off of each others’ fan base. It was more a question of genre; Thrice, a post-hardcore band concerned with questions of religion and morality, since turned a more concept-y, dark-rock band, with prog-metal-turned-‘80s-pop-soundtrack-esque Coheed and Cambria — yet it worked. By God did it work.
The, best word to describe Touché Amoré’s entry onto the hallowed O2 Brixton stage is... explosive. Punching the air in triumph, frontman Jeremy Bolm alone would have been a force to be reckoned with, but with the rest of the band behind him, their set seemed more akin to a wall of sound and fury than it did to music. And, with drums seeking to drown everything out bar Jeremy Bolm’s semi-melodic, fully-angry shouts at the steadily growing crowd, the set simply seemed to grow rowdier as his voice grew scratchier.
“Thanks for letting us yell at you for thirty minutes”, he tells us, chuckling, and you can never really tell if he’s joking because yell *at* is about right, though the good hundred or so fans clustered up the front yelling the words right back sure put up a fight. With a speaking voice already beginning to crack under the strain — three shows in! — his ‘singing’ voice was as strong as ever, as the Los Angeles quintet tore through a litany of songs from both the recently released Lament and the older Stage Four— ‘Rapture’ and ‘Reminders’, ‘Feign’ and ‘New Halloween’ — even managing to find time for the somehow now 11 year old ‘~’. The energy exuding from the stage was almost as palpable as the sweat slowly clouding the front; even moments of relative calm still seemed to just promise more — more songs, more volume, more everything: ostensibly taking a breather led to the announcement of a last minute headline show at Boston Music Rooms the next day (Monday 17th). Finally, as the painfully brief set drew to its inevitable close, the crowd were treated to Stage Four’s opener ‘Flowers and You’, which helped round off their time in the ‘Limelight’.
A brilliant way to open both the night and the pits, though anyone without headphones may have suffered in the morning — at points, even the microphone seemed to bristle in surprise at the sheer vitriolic volume blasted through its fragile frame. The only thing missing was a surprise Andy Hull popping out from the curtains for the afore-mentioned ‘Limelight’ — though their guitarist Alex, with the night being his first time in London, did an admirable job trying to fill in for him. Still, we can dream.
A short wait, with half the audience still trying to catch their breath at that set, and somehow it was already time for the next: rocking on stage at 8:20 came Thrice. With their eleventh album Horizons / East having had the most minimal of showings in the UK — a single song at 2000 Trees in Cheltenham over the summer — it was obviously time for London to see what they’d been missing, and Thrice didn’t waste a second, breaking straight into album openers ‘The Color of the Sky’ and ‘Scavengers’. Horizons / East, part concept-album, part-introspective exploration, just oozes controlled chaos. Every song is different; ‘The Color of the Sky’ is slow, almost empirical in its approach, gentle reverb giving way to barely held panic, while ‘Scavengers’ is almost menacing in its intensity. But it was third track, firm fan favourite ‘Artists in the Ambulance’, that set the crowd off, the pop-punk-esque anthem at home with the thousands of fans happily crying along.
Dark, angsty rock anthem ‘Black Honey’ came next, the constant buzz of electric guitar an anxiety inducing drone that only heightened Dustin Kensrue’s husky voice; when it cut off towards the end, displaying a voice almost forlorn with loss, nothing but the cult-like chant rising from the masses seemed to bolster his spirits.
Following it swiftly with bass heavy ‘All The World Is Mad’, somehow sounding more poignant than ever — ‘something’s gone terribly wrong... all the world is mad‘ could quite easily be the new universal motto — and The Illusion of Safety’s ‘The Red Death’ and ‘Where Idols Once Stood’, with this year being the album’s 20 year anniversary, as well as it somehow having been the 15 year anniversary to the day of The Alchemy Index 1 & 2, it was strange hearing the change in tone. These earlier tracks felt much more visceral, almost primal in their viciousness and violence — the almost screamed imperial march of ‘Idols’ and the red-light-blasting, heart-pounding chaos of ‘Red Death’ both particularly harking back to a day long gone.
The whole set seemed one of contrasts, really. The Summer-y 'Dandelion Wine' — a slow, relatively chilled affair, Dustin’s almost syrupy vocals serenading the crowd — got superseded by blustery, Winter-y track 'Hurricane', almost prophetic in its promises of rain; meanwhile, the incendiary 'Summer Set Fire To The Rain' seemed to burn away the wind, yet somehow left the trio seeming too on the nose to seem intentional.
It was the final two tracks that felt like they left a mark though — the emotional acoustic ballad ‘Beyond The Pines’, the sole showing of 2018’s Palms, and final track 'The Earth Will Shake', the sole showing of the magnificent Vheissu. Particularly the latter, with everyone take the song a little too literally, thuds of stamping feet and clapping hands vibrating across the ground.
A fantastic set from the first of the co-headliners, though one feeling slightly less headliner-y than the posers would suggest.
Not the case for Coheed and Cambria, however. Another short wait, filled heavily by ‘80s classics — Madness and Huey and the News standing out — and then it was time for what can only be called an experience; the band didn’t even need to be on stage and it already felt like a headline set. Smoke gave way to spotlights, shining in front of the album artwork for their recently released Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind, before a pounding 'Aces High' graced the venue, Bruce Dickinson making an auditory appearance on tape as the lights began to pulse in time, before everything fell silent.
And then the lights dropped out, and the gentle twinkling of piano began to reverberate across the crowd, along with the monologue from ‘Prologue’. They had arrived.
And, as Claudio Sanchez’s lyrics kicked in, and bands of light begin to blaze their trails across the room, you could begin to understand why Coheed and Cambria were given the role of closing the show — they’re just... damn good.
Coheed’s music on stage felt cinematic. The triumphant opening of 'Beautiful Losers', for instance, complete with both Sanchez’s growls and what felt an audio track of an orchestra, just felt complete. Immersive even, waves of polished pop-prog — if that’s a term? — washing over you. Members of the audience seemed like they were in rapture, almost as awed by the auditory light-and-sound show gracing them as the actual band.
A good portion of the set featured some of the new tracks getting their London debuts, like fantastic retro-pop anthem 'A Disappearing Act', an instant classic both in terms of the crowd’s reaction and with its actual ‘80s~ style, or the incredible 'The Liars Club', complete with an anthemic and upbeat, mutually-destructive chorus, but it’s the classics that really saw the band shine. Take musical odyssey ‘... In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3’, for instance — a song thankfully much catchier than its title — and its sprawling, dystopian brilliance. Without diving too deeply into the lore, given Sanchez’s own sprawling multi-media science fiction series, the track details a quest for vengeance, and a call to arms. And, as every single person in the 5,000 strong O2 Brixton Academy raised their heads and roared along with the cathartic chorus, it very much felt like a catalyst for change, and the start of something new.
With hair almost as iconic as his voice, the fantastic Sanchez simply never stopped moving around the stage, as consummate and class a frontman as you could ever want; it doesn’t hurt that a beauty of a two headed guitar made an appearance in 'Welcome Home', oftentimes played behind his head, as fury-ridden pits chasmed into existence during the triumphant, vitriolic single. An acoustic intro for Window of the Waking Mind, too, helped the musical virtuoso cover all his instrumental bases.
Meanwhile, a final encore track of The Running Free, the crowd screaming it back to the stage, word by passionate word, only helped cement the night as one of love and community.
A fantastic night which had thousands basking in awed glory. Now to just wait for some much-needed full headline tours and an extra half an hour of rapt revelling -- it can't come too soon
Words by James O'Sullivan
Photos by Dave Curtis
