Motionless In White, Bristol O2 Academy,
Ahh the good old O2 Academy in Bristol. It’s a much-maligned venue amongst many of the MoM regulars and with good reason: it’s often an absolutely terrible place to watch bands. However I must give credit where it’s due as there have been some sightings of the green shoots of improvement during my past couple of visits there; for example the cage around the sound desk area which obscured the view for anyone in and around the bar is thankfully now gone and on my last two visits at least there were numerous stewards around the building ensuring exits and – crucially in my opinion – the stair cases at the sides of the main room were kept clear the whole night. Admittedly it helped that neither of the two shows I went to had been oversold (or were even sold out as far as I could tell) but as a certain supermarket loves to say: every little helps.
Something that didn’t help on the night under review was the rather massive queue I encountered when I arrived at the venue not too long after the advertised door time. Said queue meant that your writer missed the entirety of the first support act, Thailand’s Defying Decay. Unfortunate but sadly unavoidable. I did however catch all of the main support act Skold (6). Led by industrial legend and producer extraordinaire Tim Skold, the band that bears his sobriquet play an appropriate industrial/metal type sound which I found to be enjoyable enough but often seemed to lacking a killer hook or a catchy chorus or something memorable in general. Nevertheless both main man Mr Skold and his backing band (consisting of Nero Bellum on keyboards and Jon Siren on drums) put on a decent show. Tim himself also made a cameo during the headliners set when he performed his parts of Final Dictvm which he recorded with Motionless. Speaking of whom...
Motionless In White (9) have included a Bristol stop on pretty much every full UK tour they’ve done since their first visit over here in 2013, the majority - if not all - of which I have also attended. Over these years I’ve watched the bands’ audience grow, picking up new fans with their newer industrial/metalcore hybrid sound whilst simultaneously trying to appease fans of their older, pure metalcore sound. The latter I feel is a mistake these days but that’s just my own opinion which I have stated a number of times before. Having said that I was pretty happy with the set list chosen for this show as it leaned heavily towards newer material from the bands past two releases (this years Disguise and my album of the year for 2017, the rather excellent Graveyard Shift), and featured just the one tune (Puppets (The First Snow)) from their debut.
The band have also grown a lot as performers too; whilst front Chris “Motionless” Cerulli has always dripped charisma the rest of the band are also equally as attention-grabbing on stage nowadays (especially new bassist Justin Morrow, who jumped to Motionless from previous band Ice Nine Kills and who appears to be an absolutely perfect fit for the band), although the larger stages and more elaborate stage sets the band are performing on nowadays certainly helps with that. The fans in attendance also played their part on this night with loud singalongs of fan favourites such as Reincarnate, Devil’s Night and immense set-closer Eternally Yours (in addition I personally spotted an amusingly high number of attendees singing along to the PA song played immediately following Motionless’ set – which just happened to be We Like To Party by the Vengaboys. Go figure).
Unfortunately Chris still relies a fair bit on what I shall charitably call “pre-recorded vocal elements”, although this didn’t bug me as much as it usually does for some reason as it wasn’t always quite so obvious – there were a couple of occasions when vocals could clearly be heard but no one could be seen singing, but these didn’t spoil the sheer enjoyment of the performance in my view. After all, it is the performance on the night that counts, and this was a first class one (and let’s not mention the fact that the keyboard elements of the songs were all present and correct despite the fact that the band don’t actually have a keyboard player at this moment). As this was the very last show of the tour – and of the decade – for Motionless, there was a palpable party vibe to the night, as evidenced by that Vengaboys track. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the show as I have done for every Motionless show I’ve attended thus far and I will certainly be going to see the band again if they continue to play Bristol – especially if the venue really does manage to sort itself out. There’s still a way to go on that front, but: skeletal fingers crossed
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