I remember sometime in the 1990s reading an interview with the late, legendary radio DJ John Peel, who was an enthusiastic proponent of extreme heavy metal. Peel talked about the oddness of going to see a band like the aptly-titled Extreme Noise Terror and realising that he was three times the average age of the punters in the auditorium.
That was exactly how I felt a week-and-a-half ago when I went to Singapore’s Aliwal Arts Centre to attend a gig by the Australian metalcore band Alpha Wolf. Such was the youthfulness of those around me, and such was my own feeling of decrepitude, that I wondered if I should just send myself up, impersonate Steve Buscemi in the popular Internet meme (taken from a 2012 episode of the TV show 30 Rock) and declare, “How do you do, fellow kids?”
Metalcore, Wikipedia informs me, “is a fusion genre combining elements of extreme metal and hardcore punk… noted for its use of breakdowns, which are slow, intense passages conducive to moshing.” A list of metalcore bands I’ve found on the Internet contains such names as Killswitch Engage and the Dillinger Escape Plan, bands whose albums have resided in my record collection for many years. Wow, I thought, I’ve owned metalcore music without even knowing it was metalcore!
Meanwhile, when I looked at Alpha Wolf’s Wikipedia entry, I discovered that they’d taken their name from the 2011 Liam Neeson thriller The Grey, which is about the survivors of a plane crash in an uninhabited part of Alaska being picked off one-by-one by a pack of hungry wolves. At one point, Neeson’s character, a wolf expert, explains that the beasts are led by a fearsome ‘alpha wolf, which is apparently the Alien Queen of the lupine world. However, as the band come from Tasmania, I wonder if their name was also partly inspired by their island’s most famous extinct animal, the Tasmanian wolf.
One nice thing about the Alpha Wolf gig was that support was provided by not one, nor two, but three local bands. It fascinates me that a place as famously orderly and respectable as Singapore can produce so many bands specialising in the supposedly disorderly and disreputable genre of heavy metal. Those support bands were Tariot, Tell Lie Vision and the self-described ‘progressive metalcore’ Aggressive Raisin Cat, whom John Peel would probably have awarded a session on his BBC Radio 1 show on the strength of their name alone. All three gave their sets their best shot and won the crowd’s appreciation. My only quibble was that Aggressive Raisin Cat didn’t have an image of a raisin, or indeed, a cat, projected onto the backdrop behind them while they played. Instead, there was a weird-looking spinning crisp.
The venue proved a rather austere place. It was just a space with a stage at the front, and a mixing console and a merchandising stall in the back corners. There wasn’t a bar, which meant that liquid refreshment had to be procured from the nearest branch of 7-11, which took a while to find, and led me to unfortunately miss some of Tariot’s set. In between performances, most of the crowd would seep out onto the street outside to chat, smoke and imbibe a little – despite Singapore’s reputation for strictness, drinking in public is permitted until 10.30 pm. Then, as soon as they heard the next band’s musicians striking their first chords, they’d hurry back inside again.
I’ve seen some videos by Alpha Wolf on YouTube, where they performed belters of songs like Black Mamba and Akudama, though thanks to the limited acoustics in the box-like, concrete-y confines of the arts centre auditorium, some of the shape and structure of those songs got lost a bit. Still, the intensity of the headliners’ show couldn’t be faulted. From the amount of moshing and crowd-surfing going on, and the fact that by the end of the set there seemed to be more folk on the stage than on the floor below, it was clear that Alpha Wolf had given the punters their money’s worth.
Just before the proceedings finished, a cake-and-candles were brought onstage for the celebration of someone’s birthday – I couldn’t see very clearly from my vantage point at the back of the venue, but the birthday-boy might have been the singer with Aggressive Raisin Cat – which struck me as a sweet, final touch. What a nice bunch of lads, I thought. To put it another way, despite the aural bombast, Liam Neeson should have nothing to fear if this Alpha Wolf was at his door.
© Open Road Films