Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

It doesn’t happen all that often, the East Lancs Road somehow manages to siphon off the genre and caress with guarded jealousy and a shake of the bitter fist as Manchester tends to get the big metal acts and Liverpool doesn’t even see that much of the flourish remains. It doesn’t happen all that often, despite there being an underground movement that has taken shape and led by some very impressive young Liverpool acts hell bent of taking the mountain out with animosity but January 2015 will go down on the night when three of the best Metal acts that America has to offer outside of the big four came to the city by the Mersey and blew the Echo Arena away.

There won’t be many in Liverpool that will have heard of Flint, Michigan’s King 810 until they bounded on stage like a group of wolves with the scent of new Metal blood in their steam vented nostrils and the hunt was on to track down the future, but by the time they finished their half dozen song set, there were new friends made within the Echo Arena and a new champion perhaps born.

The smallest Mosh-pit was visible; barely a scratch on the head of a pin, but it was enough to get the long-awaited movement going. American Metal was back with a bang. The nagging, sickening, and utterly dreadful thought that had seeped in and festered, spawning frightful offspring, into the minds with a pan chance for the gleaming might that Metal brings, that the genre was not just dying, it was on the verge of having a doctor asking its nearest if it would sign the consent form to turn off the ventilator; is arguably, no more than a misinformed relative placing an advertisement in the paper and hoping that something may have been left in the will.

This was King 810 not just opening for Slipknot or paving the way for Korn to give Liverpool a taste of what’s been missing in the area and what its city cousin up the East-Lancs Road has been keeping locked away in a strong box. This was the opening salvo, the bombardment of angry souls against a tidal wave of opposition, it was a salvo that the early crowd relished, defended and added to, this was not just music, it was sport.

King 810 performed tracks from their 2014 release Memoirs of a Murderer with a sense of foreboding greatness installed. The whole album has to be listened too to get the whole brutal flavour of it, Killem All, the superb Murder Murder Murder, Desperate Lovers, Boogeyman, the exceptionally bouncy and compelling Write About Us and the set closer Fat Around the Heart were greeted as though they had been played for years in Liverpool.

With even just one band having come onto the stage at the Echo Arena and tearing into the muscles and thoughts of all assembled, it just proved two things above anything else; firstly that there is such a huge appetite for Metal within the young and the experienced in Liverpool, and secondly, that King 810 are a real deal, both facts equally as exciting, both lovingly snatched from the vice like grip of the Manchester neighbour.

Ian D. Hall