Archspire, along with Undeath, Crown Magnetar, and Mutilation Barbecue, have been slowly reaching the halfway point of their Long Roads Big Loads Tour when they rolled through Tampa on a rainy Tuesday. Despite the dreary weather, the Tampa crowd absolutely flooded The Orpheum, almost to the point of maximum capacity. It was a packed house, and the bands on the night were determined to put on an absolute banger of a show.
Sometimes, a tour opener can be a real roll of the dice. Sometimes, you’ll notice the venue is half empty by the time the opener goes on. This was absolutely not one of these instances. Cleveland’s own Mutilation Barbecue opened up the night with some fast and heavy death metal. The room was jam-packed before they even went on, and they got a huge reception throughout their set. The band was super tight, heavy as hell, and fun to watch. Their latest 4-song EP, Flesh Regenerated, is out now on Maggot Stomp.
Next on the night was deathcore outfit Crown Magnetar out of Colorado. These dudes were incredibly technical, especially the drumming, but they are playing a brand of deathcore that is refreshingly minimal. Every modern deathcore-adjacent band has to have its ‘thing’, be it a gimmick or a unique twist on the formula that honestly has become rote and predictable. I don’t need glitchy, tappy guitars or orchestral synths with triple-layered vocals: I just want it to be fast, unapologetically heavy, and brutal as hell. This is what Crown Magnetar brought on the night, and the crowd ate it up.
Vocalist Dan Tucker held a commanding presence on the stage with his deep guttural growls, and it was a perfect complement to the avalanche of sound coming from the instrumentalists. Bassist Mike Sahm played like a man possessed on stage, summoning his best Jens Kidman impression at times. Their set was punctuated with a timely Wall of Death, which got pretty rowdy and was fun to watch from the safety of the sidelines.
After the crowd had peeled itself off the floor, grabbed any loose teeth, and reattached missing limbs, they were treated to some old-school death metal in the form of Undeath. The Rochester, New York band opened up by thanking the Tampa crowd for coming out and reminding them that they inhabit, to most metal nerds, sacred holy ground, thanks in no small part to the contributions of bands like Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Death, Deicide, and Obituary (to name a few). It was only fitting for them to rip through their setlist of tracks that were very much inspired by those old-school death metal bands of the late 80’s and early 90’s.
Vocalist Alexander Sason was all smiles on stage, continually reminding the crowd that this was a no-barriers show, an open invitation for the crowd to get up close and personal. Plenty of crowd surfing and moshing followed, as the band fed off the energy of the packed room and continued to ramp it up. The band was super fun to watch and had amazing energy. The band recently shared their signing to Relapse Records, with new music recorded and ready to drop later this year. They will undoubtedly become a huge name to watch in the coming years, so it was amazing to see them in such an intimate environment as this one.
Finally, to end the night was the reason we were all here, the fastest band on planet Earth: Archspire. They are without a doubt the current torchbearers of modern technical death metal, regardless of what the haters have to say about it. Haters will say the band is dumb, and honestly, the band might be the first ones to agree. On paper, it really shouldn’t work at all: the instrumentation is impossibly fast, with the vocals becoming more percussion than something you can sing along to. Their detractors will tell you ‘their vocals are too fast’, ‘they’re just a gimmick band’, ‘they’re just an overly edited studio band, they can’t play that stuff live’. Going into the show, I personally was not sure I believed the band could pull off a live show that matched the intensity of their recorded material, but I am here today to tell you, and pass on the message to all the messageboard warriors out there: these dudes absolutely rip.
I legitimately could not believe how tight the band was. I use the phrase ‘album tight’ to describe plenty of bands, because a lot of bands that have been around for a decade or more could play through their sets in their sleep. Being tight in and of itself isn’t earth-shattering by any means, but when you have a drummer like Spencer Moore behind the kit, it leads to a truly unbelievable experience. I don’t know how they’ve been getting him back and forth across the border these past few weeks because I am fully convinced he is more machine than man.
If the whole band thing doesn’t end up working out for the guys, they can always turn this roadshow into a traveling stand-up routine, because this show was actually sidesplittingly funny. In between songs, vocalist Oliver Rae Aleron told some dad jokes from a binder labeled ‘The Best Jokes Ever!’, played funny voicemails over the speakers, told a suspiciously heartfelt story about a down-on-his-luck lawyer which had a great twist ending, and even held a shooey contest with two lucky fans, the winner of which received their prize of a hand drawn ‘I Do Not Fuck Kids’ t-shirt.
Getting back to the music, which at this point almost felt like a sidenote to how much fun everyone was having, the band ripped through crowd favorites both old and new, with the crowd surfing and moshing returning at an absolute fever pitch. At one point, Aleron told the crowd that whoever could kiss the disco ball attached to the ceiling could get a t-shirt of their choosing, even offering some words of encouragement to the crowd, urging them to ‘World War Z that shit’, to which the crowd obliged, forming a human ladder so that one lucky person actually did indeed kiss the disco ball hanging 20-feet from the floor.
The crowd was great all night and had a ton of energy, with the band and crowd playing off each other and just having a really great time. At one point, someone close to the stage held up a tab book turned to the page of the song the band was playing as a helpful visual, as if the band needed it, but it caused the band to burst out into laughter nonetheless.
The band left the stage, only to return a few minutes later for an encore, playing the first few measures of the Six Feet Under song “The Noose”, with Aleron doing an almost indistinguishable Chris Barnes impression. After the laughter had died down, the band ended the night with “Carrion Ladder” off their latest album, Too Fast To Die. The album title is really poignant because, from a technical standpoint, these guys truly cannot be stopped; they are just too fast, too good, and too funny to slow down. Despite my previous hesitations, these dudes really did pull off one of the most technically impressive and, probably without contest, most entertaining shows I’ve ever been to.
The Long Roads Big Loads Tour is nearing its halfway point, with plenty of stops across the mid-to-western parts of the country, ending in their hometown of Vancouver, BC, on June 6th. If they’re playing a show near you, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by missing out: this might be the most entertaining tour of the Spring.
