Messed!Up
Canadian two-piece powerhouse METZ is pure, unadulterated, ear-bashing noise rock playing at a volume that threatens to punch an audience’s teeth down their throats. I still have vivid memories of my first METZ gig, at the Roskilde Festival 2013, and the sonic weaponry they unleashed on the smallest stage at the festival, the Pavilion. As a huge fan of noise rockers A Place To Bury Strangers, I was blown away by the wall of sound that hit me that day and have been waiting too long to cross paths with the band again – until tonight, eleven years later.
Unfortunately, tonight’s support band Lysistrata canceled the whole tour due to health reasons and it turned out to be an earlier night than expected as METZ started early.
The room was packed at Hafenklang when Metz took the stage, and a packed Hafenklang means sauna-like conditions which became apparent already from the start. I was expecting loud noise and riots – and got more than I asked for. From the first song, the latest album opener “No Reservation/Love Comes Crashing”, it was a sonic manifesto and I could almost feel the bass pounding my heart for me with some really heavy distorted bass riffs. Those killer riffs are just pure sonic assault!
As vocalist Alex Edkins pointed his guitar out into the crowd, drummer Hayden Menzies destroyed the kit at the back while Chris Slorachs’s distorted bass riffs made the floor throb during the second song “Blind Youth Industrial Park”. Third song “Acetate” – one of my absolute favorites off their second album II – cranks up the levels to new heights, the guitar urgent like a siren, Slorach’s bass unforgiving, relentless, locking everything down. Edkins guitar fizzes back into life and explodes, transforming Hafenklang into a moshpit of sweaty bodies and euphoric grins. My biggest bother, and our photographer’s, was the stiff people in the front row that just stood there, arms crossed through the whole show like they were watching a local folk music band when there was riots going on just behind them.
Tracks like “Light Your Way Home”, “Get Off”, and “99” brought an unexpected depth, with moments that made the inevitable explosions hit even harder. After running out of air the band left the stage for two minutes to come back for an encore. METZ quickly powered back into the more surging part from their 2012 debut album and shot away “Headache” before Sloarch’s opening bass riff for the final track “Wet Blanket”, a fan favorite, finally saw the moshpit erupt as steam started to form at Hafenklang. It’s just brilliant. They master the art of controlled chaos; every feedback squall and distortion-laden chord felt both spontaneous and meticulously crafted. The kind of energy this band brings to their live performance is simply undeniable, and although the audience has a bit of stiff upper lip attitude at the beginning it starts to form a moshpit in the middle.
It needs to be said, I haven’t been a huge fan of their latest album Up On Gravity Hill because it’s sort of less noise and more rock music, but hearing the songs live for the first time changed my mind, and the record is on high rotation at the moment. In a live setting it was equally beefed up by Edkins and bassist Chris Slorach, hitting 100mph and bringing it even more alive. That’s why you should listen to bands playing their records live and giving their songs new sonic textures, in this case pure raw energy.
All in all, it was a solid hour of pure sonic assault – and it was amazing. METZ are brilliant but terrifying, like an awe-inspiring violent force of nature that can’t be controlled. Let’s hope we’ll see them back at the festival tour in Europe in 2025, I definitely need more near-death sonic experiences.
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Photographer: Kevin Winiker
