The Garage is quite a strange venue. When it’s a club night, it’s one of your standard East London haunts – overpriced for no particular reason and full of some painfully edgy and cool types, but when you get a massive hardcore band and a few hundred grotty rockers in, it makes plenty of sense. There’s a fairly decent few from the front and back if you’re clever enough, and the system kicks out a decent racket without muffling the crap out of it.
HATEBREED[4/5], back for the second time since failing to make it over to Europe because of that darndest Volcano Ash Cloud in the Spring, are touring some pretty intimate venues on this tour, and the Garage is absolutely heaving with anticipation by the time they hit the stage.
As a statuesque part of the hardcore scene, you’ve gotta drop back into your back catalogue, and Hatebreed know and respect the fan favourites from the span of their career. The intensity of their live show is magnified tenfold on the smaller stages, and tonight’s a schooling for any pretenders to the throne in how to do hardcore the right way.
There’s a bit too much posing in the newer breed of hardcore, and it’s nice to turn up and have a band kick you in the face with some well executed, no nonsense hardcore now and again. A fantastic band and a great setting to take the edge of the bastard cold.
TOM AYLOTT