With a lot of people getting dressed up for the Feast Festival across the road at Light Square, the morbid and haunted tunes being played at Higher Ground last Saturday – at the best of times an oddly sterile venue – were lent an even eerier mood in Adelaide’s West End.
Hometown five-piece Rule of Thirds came on relatively early to an unfortunately scarce audience. It’s a shame, because their brand of gothic punk would have gone down well with the crowd that were to come, especially the sinister set highlight “Total Disappointment”.
Crowd numbers increased dramatically for second support, Melbourne’s Heirs.
Together with Damien Coward on drums and Laura Bradfield on bass, Brent Stegeman was the centrepiece with his deafening, heavily overdriven and delayed guitar.
Their tense and tortured loop-based post-metal was a heavy and evocative mix, especially on set highlight “Hunter”. Despite the presence of a smoke machine that was at once hilarious and excessive but also oddly fitting, the crowd lapped up the band, and were left wanting more after a seemingly brief thirty minutes.
Chelsea Wolfe came on soon after and opened with “Movie Screen”, her band dressed in all black and the lighting low. With the more rollicking and muscular “Demons” following this, Wolfe had the crowd well and truly onside by the time she launched into the anxious and gritty set highlight “Mer”.
She demanded her voice be higher in the mix, and with good reason – despite being drenched in reverb, her vocals were stunning, at once powerful yet highly emotive.
The band consisted of Ben Chisholm on synth and bass, Kevin Dockter on guitar, with the real highlight being Dylan Fufioka on drums; his playing was beautifully restrained, especially on tracks such as the slower “Tracks (Tall Bodies)” and the aforementioned “Movie Screen”.
With the calming “Flatlands” coming towards the end of the set, the crowd seemed appreciative of the quiet conclusion to the night given the intensity that had come before.
Chelsea Wolfe and her band were the image of professionalism, delivering a rock-solid set of heavy, haunted rock. Foregoing almost any in-between song banter with the crowd, she was completely in control of the almost silent crowd and allowed the songs to speak for themselves.
With the audience diving for the merch stand afterwards, it was clear she had left in her wake a legion of passionate new fans.
