The tech-giants and djent pioneers of Periphery  (*****) are touring through Europe in support of their latest album III: Select Difficulity . With such a high quality of work I wondered how they would sound live as the compositions are quite challenging to perform and how would lead vocalist Spencer Sotelo do this live as he raised the bar for himself very high as not to say for other vocalists.

Arrived a bit too late to be able see the Italian progressive metalcore band Destrage  and even missed the half of the set of US djenty proggers The Contortionist , yeah thank you Antwerp with your hellhole of road works, the Trix Club was quite packed and incredible hot. From the two songs I saw from The Contortionist I can say they listened very well to Periphery and mixed it together with Meshuggah influences. They received a very good response from the audience, personally these two songs couldn’t convince me, missed a bit the melodies that a Periphery has in their songs, but hey that’s why they are Periphery.

After a short break that was very welcome to get some fresh air, the crowd went insane when Spencer and Mark Holcomb came on to stage to start off with the incredible beautiful A Black Minute. What a start, meanwhile Misha Minsoor joined them on stage together with Jake Bowen and Matt Halpern. But hey, aren’t we missing someone, where is Nolly, Nolly where are you ? It seems that he wasn’t there, I don’t know the exact reason for this but the bass tracks played along with the backing tracks. Even the absence couldn’t kill the joy the crowd had. With excellent versions of Stanger Things, The Way The News Goes and Marigold the Trix Club became even more sweatier. The crowd chanted these songs along which the band enjoyed very much. The vocal performance of Spencer was quite impressive, what a voice this guy has, for sure he will become one of the best vocalists in the metal genre. The whole band is just incredible. Playing with three(!)  guitarists is not easy , Periphery  succeeds in it by not letting all guitars play the same thing all the time. The impressive guitar work of Jake, Misha and Mark is unbeatable and it’s nice to see how much fun they have together on stage. We may not forget the excellent drumming of Matt Halpern, some songs were taken on another level by the way he varied his drumming. Personally I found  his  live drumming has more power and punch than on disc (not that is bad there).  With a crowd that needed to sing along the begin riff of Remain Indoors the musically impressive adventure continued . Periphery doesn’t let the crowd get a breath, with crazy versions of The Bad Thing and Flatline it became sweaty bloody sweaty. After an intermezzo of a Haunted Shores song Memento the set came to an end with excellent versions of Psychophere and Masumune. An encore was given in the form of Lune.

https://www.facebook.com/PeripheryBand/videos/10155398827453217/

Periphery delivered a hell of show in a hot as hell Trix Club. It was nice to see that are a lot of young people who were enjoying this music. The future is bright for metal and for Periphery. Although it was quite surprising that they didn’t play Alpha or Scarlet, Periphery is a band that has the wealth of such a catalogue of good songs that there will always be people that are not satisfied because they didn’t play their favorite song. If festivals are still looking for bands, go for Periphery , you won’t be disappointed. I wasn’t, soaked by sweat I left very satisfied the Trix club until I arrived at my car. Some birds had fun shitting my car all over, oh well …

Setlist : 

 A Black Minute
Stranger Things
The Way the News Goes…
Marigold
Remain Indoors
Prayer Position
The Bad Thing
Flatline
Memento
(Haunted Shores cover)
Psychosphere
Masamune
Encore:
Lune