Artist:  Whitechapel 

Venue: Leeds Met, Leeds

Date:  8 March 2010 

With Londoners Rise To Remain having played pretty much as soon as the doors opened tonight to a mixture of the confused and the bored, the kids are more than ready to mosh by the time Whitechapel take the stage at the still-very-early hour of 7.30pm.  

With only half an hour to play with, Whitechapel can’t mess about tonight which makes the presence of a lengthy intro-tape somewhat puzzling but as soon as that’s out of the way, the band are all-business and proceed to completely level the room with their loud, in your face deathcore. 

This however, can be a good or a bad thing depending on your point of view and, looking around the room, your age. It would appear that Whitechapel’s reputation as darlings of the ‘-core’ scene is somewhat well-founded as most of those in the front few rows who are going apeshit for them look like they will be taking their GCSE finals in a few months’ time (ironic really considering that the same thing could’ve easily have been written about tonight’s headliners Trivium just a few years ago). 

And while the older fans in the crowd by no means boo them and most do watch them until the end and give them a well-deserved applause, there is a distinct feeling that at the end of the day, they could take or leave Whitechapel and that the band have not won over as many new fans as they would’ve liked tonight.  The band are certainly at the more professional and tight end of the deathcore genre but unfortunately fall into the trap that so many of their peers often fall prey to – individuality.  You could tell a casual fan that the band on stage were any one of several deathcore bands and they would probably believe you such is the interchangeable nature of the genre and as with many other bands, a lot of that lies with the vocals. 

Whitechapel have some fantastically heavy riffs that would incite even the most apathetic of crowds into a violent moshpit but the whole experience is left somewhat wanting when the frontman is trying to convey serious emotion but can’t do it fully because nobody can understand what the hell he’s talking about. This is angry music and its presence in the world is very important as anger is an important human emotion that everyone deals with on a daily basis, it’s just that conveying such an important feeling through inaudible screams makes the whole thing come off as a little bland and if a frontman wants to scream and stomp around the stage and convince me that he’s genuinely pissed off... then I least need to be able to hear why.

Review by: Adam G

 

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