 While She Sleeps are on fire tonight and they
smash the Birmingham academy 2 apart with tracks
from their debut album “The North Stands
for Nothing”. The lighting is set up brilliantly
however blinding me during parts of their set
but it all adds to the atmosphere they put out;
strobes bouncing off them as they all bounce around
the stage with energy and power. At the end of
the set, lead vocalist Lawrence Taylor flies off
the stage into the crowd with his microphone and
organises a massive wall of death; whilst he’s
doing that someone else grabs hold of his trousers
and when the wall of death hits drags him out
of the way. They give an amazing commitment to
giving a great fair play to them.
Of Mice and Men are good, but they just don’t
live up to that previous act in my opinion. Musically
I much preferred While She Sleeps because this
band tries to put extremely heavy vocals together
with some clean ones but in the way of mixing
As I Lay Dying with You Me @ Six and the product
is something that doesn’t really tickle
my fancy. Regardless you cannot deny that they
are a force to be reckoned with on stage and know
exactly what they’re doing.  Hailing from
the USA this band have only been together for
2 years but have a second album on the way and
a large amount of shows under their belt in America
on a large scale so coming over to Europe and
UK to play these small sold out shows doesn’t
even phase them. Pure confidence and aggression
and to look at them you can tell this is where
they naturally belong, between song singer Austin
Carlile does begin to get a bit repetitive towards
the end but on the whole valiant effort.
Asking Alexandria have had a massive hype around
this gig for weeks now, everyone I speak to is
really excited and a lot don’t have tickets
as it’s a completely sold out show. So you’d
think with all this hype and attention that what
you’d be about to witness would be one of
the best shows ever by some really professional
musicians who really give it their all; this is
not the case, they play a decent show but the
hype exceeds the performance by a long shot. Seeing
as they were hung-over earlier and then the guitarist
hit the stage chugging a bottle of wine I could
see where this was going. They have big songs
and they perform them terrifically; the thing
that lets them down is that once a song is over
their front man, Danny Worsnop who has a big presence
during songs doesn’t follow it through and
ends up repeating himself many times and trying
different things eventually  leading to him telling
the crowd they were going to do an encore and
ruining that part of the live show, he also couldn’t
remember the set list and had to check it to see
what it was. Even after all of this and the fact
that the crowd pretty much predicted everything
that was coming showing they really need to shake
things up a bit; the crowd absolutely lost their
minds and went berserk. Every song had the same
momentum and sheer energy in that pit and had
everyone bouncing around; it’s an absolute
delight to be a part of. May I add whilst I’ve
slated them for their unprofessionalism the way
they perform their material is just flawless,
they produce the atmosphere and the intensity
for all the craziness to flow and during their
songs they are great. Coming back on to their
already announced encore and give 2 more songs
including “The Final Chapter” before
leaving Birmingham on a high note. To be honest
with this crowd they could have been terrible
and I think they love them that much they’d
have still gone crazy, they could be an unstoppable
force in the near future.
While She Sleeps – 5/5
Of Mice and Men – 4/5
Asking Alexandria – 4/5
Review By James Webb
Photos By Olly Goodman
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