[Gig Review] CANDLEMASS (SWE) w/ MAMMON’S THRONE (AUS) @ Corner Hotel, 29.09.26.
Words:
Brady Irwin
Photography:
Richie Black
Presented by:
Your Mate Bookings
Venue:
The Corner Hotel (Richmond, Melbourne)
(see end of article for relevant artist/stakeholder links)
FOREWORD: Thanks For Having Me Back, Everyone.
Truly a surreal experience for me, stepping back into the [Gig Review] game. Just weeks prior, embroiled in the strangest response ever to the announced need for deleting Facebook/minimising our digital footprint (it just isn’t half the utility Instagram is, among other things), an inpatient psychiatric admission, a stint of homelessness, experiencing abuse and more? Man oh man, absolutely wild that I’d be heading out from a lovely sub-residential facility (specifically, a Prevention and Recovery Centre - more on that model of care here) into that cold, dark night in Richmond.
Pinching myself, semi-dissociated and wracked with a social anxiety I haven’t felt bristle under the skin since my adolesence, I nonetheless persisted. I almost didn’t - the preceding traumatic nightmare of the past few weeks had me torch socials in oppositional-defiant (and embarrassing) autistic/hypomanic rage, even swearing to my own staff that Inner-Strength Check was and is very much one.
This being my first Gig Review back, and my first since decentralising our team model away from single-neurodivergent-point-of-burnout-failure, it’s the latest I’ve left a review in a long time. Miraculously, our Swedish epic-doom maestros Candlemass were bringing the lilting sonic thunder to Melbourne two nights in a row - you can thank ‘Mosh Lord Sammy-O’ (aka, Sammy O’Flynn) and Co for saving our promoter-bacon.
I’m glad that an episode of severe mental health, enforced isolation, homelessness and more couldn’t stop me. Couldn’t stop US.
We’re a more anarchic unit now, with processes set up to help us delegate and self-manage across a team.
It’s absolutely without a doubt that holding onto too many of the keys (average autistic/ADHD energy, and damn near lethal) was a significant contributor to my burnout, amongst many other factors that are simply too harrowing for me to discuss in a public forum if I’m to be trauma-informed.
Trauma-informed, yes. Strengths-based, even more so. The programme at PARC, sitting with the darkest and most brutal hyperbaric chamber of biopsychosocial hell-storm, all that?
It’s only spurred me on more to continue.
But to continue in a different way. A little less perfectionistic, and learning to be far less over-compensatory.
Enjoy the review, enjoy our sizeable recording of the set as though you’re there/back there yourself.
Amidst many other changes (my writing style, my personal boundaries and assertiveness, ongoing shunning of toxic masculinity as a metalhead male, etc), we’re looking to bring equipment to shows that’ll give you more of these decent snaps of the night in question.
Biggest of thanks to the Inner-Strength Check Team, to those who helped me through a frankly absurd and intense period of personal crisis.
To Anthony Blayney and the Your Mate Bookings crew, Corner Hotel staff, punters and of course the artists themselves - thank you. Bolting out the door during dinner-time in a communal kitchen area in an otherwise relaxed mental health recovery facility isn’t your usual start to a gig-review, but it’s mine.
That whole slogan, Hobbies. Riffs. Mental Health? Yeah, that. But with less oversharing and succumbing to a bunch of core beliefs and schemas I’m going to be working on much more closely and carefully with my psychologist.
Take my recent…. whole thing…. as an extremely important lesson for you content-creators out there.
It’s tough-going. Let’s dance amongst the first embers of late-stage capitalisms’ nuclear fallout together - moshing, singing, screaming, headbanging, and milking every iota of joy we can out of these absurdist post-pandemic times.
Thanks for Having Me Back.
Here’s a picture of my cat-son Butters to lighten up the mood, pre-doominess.
As Always,
Peace, Love and Grindcore,
Brady
(Patreon-Guy/Podcast Host/Former ISC Supreme Leader/Co-Conspiring Content-Anarchist)*
*- no, that’s not actually a new title lol. I’m now just a Contributor for the sake of the blog, and Patreon Guy/podcaster.
When Anthony and the absolute legends at Your Mate Bookings first announced that Swedish epic doom progenitors Candlemass were finally heading Down Under for the first time since forming in 1984, that original Wednesday 30th September show sold out at warp-speed. With multiple generations being born and bred since the bands’ onset, the canonical classics are both dearly-treasured nostalgia as the newer output trickles epic-doom down into the hungry mouths of riff-loving Zeds (and hopefully Alphas too, eh Dads?).
Rather than leave half of Victoria’s sludgiest punter "lonely and forlorn, and crying" outside the pub, a second show was slotted in on Tuesday 29th September…prior to the original date. Meaning that by a hilarious quirk of tour-routing mathematics (the only time you’ll catch me laughing - I hate that stuff, it’s the bane of my Tabletop existence!), the "extra" Tuesday show I was standing in had accidentally become literally the undisputed first time in forty-two years that Candlemass had ever set foot on an Australian stage.
Being a fan of these guys for many years has been interesting. As with hardcore, death metal, post-hardcore and a few other heavy sub-genres, I’m usually partial to the scummier musical end of the doom spectrum. Your Khanates, Indians, Ghostsmokers - grimy, filthy stuff you’d hesitate to smear on the walls of the toilets at The Bendi. Ain’t that saying something? I’m not typically into power-metal or genres with such soaring and melodically operatic vocals.
But there’s just something about Candlemass. Something expertly refined and distilled into doom-metal that is both crystalline and gargantuan. Hence, an already-packed out venue as my akathisia-riddled ass slid in at doors. (Guh, thank god they took me off a certain medication that won’t be named, but can confirm tonights’ gig was a great somatic-healing intervention).
Doors being at 7:00pm on a school night, there’s that familiar, slightly damp Melbourne spring chill outside as the vapers, smokers, and assorted black-shirted lung-busters huddle near the entrance before filing into the bandroom.
You can spot the generational cross-section of hapless doom tragics from a mile off: greying lifers in faded 80s tour denim who’ve been waiting since Epicus Doomicus Metallicus dropped on vinyl, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with twenty-something converts in fresh battle-jackets. After the hellish psychological run I’d just endured, I was moving quite a bit more cautiously betwixt them all, smartphones and tripod in hand. Tonight was time to give Youtube, this blog and elsewhere some serious footage treatment.
Anyway, an epidemiological report on how the venue filled out with punters on a Tuesday is about as exciting as a tax return in slow-motion, and I’ve already broken my self-promise to not be overly-inclusive in my written garbles.
Let’s steer it back to the stage.
And, for our opening act, we’re steering it hard with a local death-doom institution.
MAMMON'S THRONE (AUS)
If you’re going to warm up a room full of protective, arms-crossed doom purists who have waited four decades for the main event, you don’t bring a polite opening act. You don’t just shrug it off and call in your mates’ brothers’ cousins’ collective of bong-suckers who are totally finishing that 4-track EP they started in oh, the 90s.
You bring a wrecking ball.
Enter Melbourne’s own death-doom four-by-two to the forehead, Mammon’s Throne.
Having seen these lads tear rooms apart around town before many times, to the point of oversaturation even, I must say I was seriously impressed by how reinvigorated I was in the bands’ live show for this set. Their A-game is always great, but this felt apex. They understood the brief and took it brutally seriously, but with a healthy penchant for rockin’ and rollin’ in a timeless fashion to boot.
Dudes were raging hard, but also straight up having the time of their lives. They seemed enamoured, relaxed and furious all at once. Kinda like my average mood from minute-to-minute.
Charting their progress via Sammy’s praise for how effortlessly they owned the Wednesday crowd, Night One (Tuesday, then - no maths required!) was a little more terse. Again, it’s early in the week; hangovers and comedowns have worn off and the bleak brutalist reality of life amidst the concrete settles in hard on a Tuesday. I was exempt from such fun, instead riddled with side effects from meds I never asked to be on. Party hard!
Wednesday’s punters walked in knowing the tour was already a triumph and a done-deal. Tuesday’s crowd had that palpable, reverent first-night tension hanging in the air. Mammon’s Throne took approximately forty-five seconds to grind that effuse tension into bonemeal. The riffs splattered like the blood-red adorning those insane vinyls at the infamously Nokia 3315 Snake-esque merch queue. Besides Your Mate The Ubiquitous Pole (?Bookings..?), a known gripe of the venue’s playing limbo, conga and all sorts through a first bands’ set just to nab some Gildan cotton or plentiful other goodies.
Being a broke-ass Disability pensioner and wanting to get straight to recording-business, I opted for the flanks.
Right from the jump, on the live front and with tonight’s backline setup, the tone was something else. Filth. Pure, agonisingly delicious, subterranean filth. Oh GOD. The head-to-shoulders relief of physical tension, trauma wisping away from my body in an ecstatic wave of fuzz that no uppity clinician 12hrs into a shift could hope or need to understand.
A very unfortunate iatrogenic-harm psychiatric pairing might’ve rocked my skull into oblivion (ADHD folks - do NOT let a doctor prescribe you medicinal cannabis for sleep relief if you’re on Vyvanse…. BIG, brain-splattering no-no!) necessitating a pharmacological intervention, but its’ the Throne’s riffage that had me feeling spiritually renewed, not bereft, for the first time in ages. Ironic that the dopamine-antagonists were furiously at work to detract from the experience - ‘mental health’ ‘n’ all that. Proof eternal that special-interest and heavy metal are their own additive to your treatment regimen!
This is the exact moment of the evening where I became immediately, profoundly glad I didn’t do me an ADHD and leave the earplugs sitting on the kitchen counter yet again - even if they’re Hearos and not the custom-molds I lost along with my mind recently (sniff/mind still at-large elsewhere).
‘Cause ho-ly, chat - the sheer low-end pushing out of the foldbacks was enough to rearrange your internal organs. No innuendo required there, not when Sam Talbot-Cannon’s bass-cannon is a Howitzer of grit, nor when his rhythmic accompaniment in Nick Boschan is bashin’ that kit into the lowest layer of the lich’s crypt.
There was a filthy, metallic clack sitting right on top of the sub-bass weight tonight, pairing up with dual-guitars that sounded more like angry chainsaws being dragged across dry concrete than musical instruments. MOLTO BENE! Belissimo. That’s the stuff of spiritual healing and psychosocial recovery, friends.
The gnat-buzz muck is a huge departure from the cleanliness of the headliners’ tonal cleanliness later, and the discordance works a treat on a crowd with collectively more headbang-output. Amesh Perera is as wide-eyed in his signature semi-crazed expressive flair as he is histrionic on the frets; rhythm guitarist Johnny Chammas is no slouch either, punching riff-holes and lead squeals into eager cochleas. I swear the lads had dialled the pedalboards straight to >90’s< tonight; irrespective, the washy strains of reverb couldn’t keep up with their (or any of the rest of the bands’) wild head-swinging, raucous energy.
Even the drums punched like a horse-kick to the chest. The snare-cracks resounding sharply off The Corner’s low ceiling seemed to wobble and distort the air, and I’d passed my MSE free of psychotic symptoms thank you very much.
Leaning heavily into cuts from their monstrous recent self-titled LP and My Body to the Worms material, what separates Mammon’s Throne from bands that just worship at the altar of slow minor-pentatonic plodding is their pacing.
One minute you’re sinking into cavernous, funeral-parlour gloom with mournful, harmonised twin-leads weeping over the top; the next, they drop the clutch into an outright *Obituary*-styled death metal stomper that has the front three rows gurning like they’ve just bitten into a raw lemon. Stupendously gurn-inducing stuff… nummy nummy for my doom-lovin’ tummy. By the time their final wall of amp feedback rang out and they raised horns to a roaring bandroom, our imperious, snooty Tuesday-night metalhead armour had been thoroughly stripped away.
I know I’ve thrown mild shade at the blokes for being perma-present at any Melbourne gig involving so much as a single sad tri-tone riff, but I swear they’re just getting better with age.
Like fine wine, that’s a perfect segue from the stupendous choral cheering of the audience and out into the night air. At this point, the antipsychotic-snakes are writhing (heh, Melbourne band puns?) relentlessly and I’m getting dysregulated. When you nab an ADHD man’s usual bolster for clear-headed reviewing for one, then force dopamine-blockers on an unmedicated frontal lobe? You get a bit of a mess.
Stepping outside to punch the vape like it owes the Mob protection-money, I’m nevertheless grinning as I chat away with mates and punters alike. You can stick any evidence-based program, tool or treatment into me and it’ll ‘work’ to varying degrees of success (not pictured: past psychologists tapping toes and shaking heads), but this is the stuff that truly forms a core root of my wellbeing regimen. It took a while away and a little bit of a menty-b to realise that, but truly - nothing could’ve been a better re-entry back into doing this than a doom-metal double-hitter. A 12-band hardcore gig may well have killed me. Or not. It’s all good out here, and being back in the fray with a head still rattling from Mammon’s was all the perspective-taking I needed.
CANDLEMASS (SWE)
As a regular reader of my infamously overly-wordy reviews, you’ll be relieved to learn this is the part where we finally get to the headliners. Ahh McCain, you’ve done it again! Ah well. Too bad. You want well-written and succinct? Sammy’s review is up top. I’m just here to drool post-episode pontification.
That’s right - known for stacking bills meticulously like the coins of a Khajiit from The Elder Scrolls (and my onerously long screeds not far behind, often) YMB’s been purposefully lean on the bill tonight. Blayney’s a tactician in that regard, and giving our four-decade-awaited Svenska doom-metallers additional breathing-room worked a perfect treat.
Before the lights drop, though, we need to talk about the massive, black-cloaked twist of lemon spliced into this long-awaited Aussie touchdown.
Back in August, I had the pinch-yourself, surreal honour of sitting down with original Epicus Doomicus Metallicus vocalist **Johan Längqvist** for Episode 86 of the Inner-Strength Check Podcast. Johan was beaming about finally making it down to Australia, and seemed genuinely enraptured with the thought.
Imagine our national heartbreak on the poor buggers’ behalf when news dropped right on the eve of the tour that Johan had been sidelined by a sudden health issue (heal up soon, legend!), a collective cold-sweat broke out across the Aussie doom commune.
Who on Earth do you even get in to replace such iconic, powerful pipes?
Do we need to construct a cyborg for that?! Who, I pray, doom-metal rosaries in hand? Who even fits such a bill? An insanely tall order, and one that requires the perfect stand-in.
On top of that, and even more props paid for the effort - who steps in at the eleventh hour, jumps on that brutal long-haul flight from Scandinavia to the bottom of the world, and sings not only Johan’s 1986 Epicus hymns, but Messiah Marcolin’s operatic, larger-than-life Nightfall and Ancient Dreams classics to boot?!
Enter Chilean-born, Sweden-based doom powerhouse Felipe Plaza Kutzbach (Procession, Capilla Ardiente, Nifelheim).
Here is the core difference between Sammy’s Night Two experience and what transpired on Tuesday Night One: by Wednesday, word had already spread across Melbourne that Felipe was an absolute weapon, and the sound desk had had a full night in which to tame the room. On Tuesday night? Nobody knew what was about to happen, but even as I type up the review, I’m pressed to think of any replacement vocalist I’ve seen for any gig who copped that much first-name chanting. Tell you what - bloke earnt it.
As the sombre, unmistakable strains of the ‘Marche Funèbre’ interlude echoed out over the PA and Mats ‘Mappe’ Björkman, Lars Johansson, Jan Lindh, and low-end anchor/rabble-rouser Leif Edling took their places, the roar that greeted them was forty years of pent-up disbelief finally unravelling in a wave of exultant, stupendous awe.
And straight we go into the lurching, heaving hoof-stomp of perennial classic ‘Bewitched’!
Now, in the interest of journalistic honesty… across the opening few minutes of ‘Bewitched’ and its immediate follow-up, the ball-crushing Ancient Dreams opening riff-fest ‘Mirror Mirror’, there were a couple of minor technical gremlins on stage and a bit of a wrestle at the sound desk. It jilted the flow for a minute, but punters are understanding the venue and artists are working with a menagerie of electronica and cables that don’t always play audio-engineering ball.
The Corner Hotel can be a boxed-in beast of a room when four-hundred-ish bodies pack it out, and initially the guitars and vocal mic were fighting each other in the midrange. You could still see a few sceptical old heads near the pillar squinting up at the new bloke, a vanguard hypervigilance that I respect on the basis of sheer time passed.
And then comes crashing down the walls of ‘Dark Are the Veils of Death’, which in its’ own right is brought to soaring heights by our expertly-skilled standee and his crew of veteran Swedes. That’s an exercise in chest-thudding low-end doom brilliance alone, but the the moment that clanged the entire venue like a goddamned cathedral bell for me was ‘Demon’s Gate’. When Mappe and Lars locked into that haunting, monolithic opening riff of, the front-of-house mix suddenly snaps into a focal point that feels too seismic to even bear. My chest tightens with overwhelm, unfettered wholesale by the dopaminergic rush of Dr. Riff’s neurological handiwork.
Put more o’ that on the prescription pad, uppity medical practitioners, ‘cause THIS is where the real healing begins.
Ah yes, Felipe. Old-mate didn't just ‘fill in’. He didn’t even give it an above-average performance. Brother took complete ownership of the building. Pacing the front barrier with wild-eyed, theatrical gravitas, beating his chest like he’s about to call for a wall-of-death, and throwing his fist out toward us, he nailed those soaring, vibrato-soaked high notes with a level of power most sorcerers could barely hope to attain.
"Look for the needle inside the haystack / Look for the nail in the pile of bones!” is a line still clanging around in my head some time later, a pivotal roar crooned into a harmonic point so soulful it wets the eyes of any lingering machismo in the audience. This is barrier-breaking stuff, right here folks.
Any lingering purist scepticism wasn't just gone; it had been cremated and scattered across Swan Street to be lapped up by, I don’t know, preppy kids and eshay lads. Stuff ‘em, there’s no way anything on the eponymous Richmond strip comes even close to the arcane spells being slung at us in slow, powerful waves. Almost pity the poor saps.
Want to really drive it home to the street-side suckers who opted for shitty DJ’s over imperialistic metal-majesty? Huh? C’mon, you’re a metalhead. I know you do.
Hit ‘em with this and tell them known-crazy-person and the lovably cognitively-impaired Brady sends his sarcastic regards. Sarcastic, because it’s the society that shuns, others and dismisses us metalheads that misses out on the closest to Godhood you’ll cop in these fevered times (in my opinion, anyway) - gigs.
Pull this one back up for later, ‘cause this is a big one - forty-one minutes of Candlemass’ set!
(By the way, I’m still editing and uploading a whole bunch of footage from the night, so be sure to follow our socials or check back in when I get the Gallery of Brewicide photography/footage addendum up on the website. Make sure you’re following our new Instagram too, not the old one!):
(Yes, if you hear someone yelling "Yeeeeeeeew!" near the mic while trying to hold a phone steady against the speakers—guilty as charged, lol).
A double-honour for these guys, then - my return to ISC after nearly razing the place when at my worst and the longest chunk of footage we’ve ever uploaded. Even that nor my dodgy attempts at practicing Python code-blocks on the saturation do it justice. Really, the whole set deserves enshrinement on the ‘Tube.
What struck me most standing just metres from the stage during the mid-set transition into ‘Under the Oak’ wasn’t just the nostalgia-factor. A nostalgia borrowed from early-aughts for me, but much further by some of our more wisened audience counterparts.
It’s the sheer presence, the structural and auditory architecture of these songs in a live setting. That’s the only clever metaphor I’ve got for something so institutional, rock-solid and vast-sounding. And I talk/type a lot, evidently.
Talking about ‘epic doom’ whilst in forum-fistfights over subgenre tags on Metal-Archives is one thing (glad those days are many years behind me - self-cringe), but watching Lars effortlessly unspool positively weeping, neoclassically-regal solos over a rhythm section moving like a kaiju through a glacier…?
It’s breathtaking.
Lars plays with the relaxed, effortless poise of a dude who’d shred your face off in his sleep without a second thought. Every bend hitting with pinpoint emotional accuracy, punching through months of burnout-laced interoception in a way no Acceptance and Commitment Therapy strategy could. Truly an immediate moment of autistic healing felt right down to my one remaining synapse.
And then—bah gawd, son. Sonny Jim, siree-Bob.
Don’t even get me freaking started (I’m going to anyway) on the back half of this setlist. Setlist II: It Just Gets Heavier And Heavier (Epic Doom-Metal Boogaloo).
We get treated to the crushing, newer-era groove of ‘Sweet Evil Sun’**, proving their recent output stands tall alongside the proud 80s pantheon, before diving straight back into the Epicus and *Nightfall* vaults for the ironically-shattering **‘Crystal Ball’** and the monumental ‘The Well of Souls’. I’m absolutely not about to sit here and fastidiously pretend I’m hugely into epic doom, but those two tracks especially had me near howling in their sheer weight and emotional resonance. I can feel somatic gears unwrenching after months of airtight, muscular tension. The doomiest of massages from the most skilled of hands.
By this point, the entire front half of the bandroom has dissolved into a sea of synchronized, slow-motion neck-snapping. This was really pleasing to see, as there was a (likely awe-struck, granted) stillness to the sets’ first-half that nearly had me in a ‘tism-rage of just wishing the kite-string would snap on inertia. Thankfully, it did, and gigs truly are one of those things where you’re reminded crowd-energy is as crucial to the journey as the tunes themselves.
Plus, not to mention - four decades as a band. I can barely get through a set without wishing for a chiropractor and I’m 37. Everyone, self included, was bolt-upright and deer-in-headlights throughout, between punctuated choruses of loud vocal cheering. And so much Felipe-love. It was really heartwearming to this grizzled, flash-fried psyche to see so many mutual grins, fist-bumps and more between band and floor.
There’s something deeply communal and almost church-like (well… if said church involved more tinnitus, pricey pints and black t-shirts) about watching hundreds of Aussies bellowing thirty-eight-year-old doom lyrics back at five blokes from Sweden who look genuinely blown away by the reception. "Thank you so much, Melbourne!" Felipe grins between tracks, visibly soaking in the roar of a crowd that has completely adopted him as one of their own.
A man of few words overall, ‘cause he’s gotta save the kinetic potential output of a small city every time those organs play another track. I’d be judicious too, and frankly I was too spellbound to catch much oratory otherwise.
When the unmistakable juxtaposition of clean and ominous tones for the intro to ‘A Sorcerer’s Pledge’ begins to trickle out of the amps, folks around me are genuinely bug-eyed. It’s not often you catch a band so firmly rooted and planted in a traditionalist metal style cop looks like that, this far into a swaggering and honestly marathon-length set.
Mercifully for everyone around me, my jaw currently cannot be located. Forgo the usual grammar, go internet-speak and call this one in particular E P I C. Does what it says on the tin, but the tins’ the size of several large planets and its’ somehow crammed into this room with us. It’s a presence I’m glad I don’t have to explain to any burnt-out triage staff, ‘cause the sheer monumental shape and form’d have anyone describing it at that moment placed right under The Mental Health Act.
Once again - let the normies be. Poor saps deprive themselves of spiritually nourishing experiences like this, but I sincerely hope they’ve got a similar interest-based avenue of their own. Meanwhile, back into doom-land we go!
Watching them build that sprawling, ten-minute arrangement from a whisper to a thunderous, galloping crescendo under washing red and blue lights after such personal strife, after such a heinously traumatic run of shit life-circumstances?
Who needs to ever, ever do a single gratitude exercise when they’re attending a gig like this. Epigenetics writes the epic genetics of these Swedes straight into your bones. Right to the marrow. It’s rich, earthy and confronting all at once.
Doesn’t hurt that Jan Lindh’s kit is as monstrous as each methodical, powerful thwack of stick on skins and cymbals, either. That’s the thing about doom-metal; easier said than done. To nail the beat at a lower tempo when you’ve got acoustics, jetlag and all-and-sundry weighing you heavier than the force of these riffs? Solid effort.
Here’s the part that’ll surprise absolutely no ardent ‘Mass fans. I mean c’mon dude…there was only ever going to be one way to close the curtain on Candlemass’s first-ever night on Australian soil. I’m so sure of it that I’d be totally unsurprised if Canberra bum-rushed it into legislature whilst the guys were miles above the ocean enroute to this very gig.
Silence is deafening, they say. And there’s a respectful lack of that bloke or two up back swaying and gnattering someone’s ear off worse than me sober (it’s bad, ask my friends). The warm acoustic-tinged arpeggios of ‘Solitude’ ring out across a suddenly hushed room. Call the pollies, ‘cause these goosebumps are mandatory.
And when that Big Chungus of a main riff finally drops like a guillotine? Oof. An entire venue of grown men and women screaming "Please let me die in solitude!" at the absolute top of their lungs. It’s a sombre lyric on paper, sure, and its’ given a personal gravitas that just adds to the doom-metal melancholy.
The final applause under shining, white stage-lights at the finish is massive, sweaty, and jubilant—a deafening roar of gratitude for a night forty years in the making. I legitimately think I marked skin from pinching myself, but I was just as baleful as the other wolves in howling glorious doom-metal appraisal.
Goddamn. Just, goddamn.
Compare Night One and Night Two however you like. It’s a free country, and gigs ain’t cheap. Have at it in the Court of Public Opinion in the comments below or on social media, but don’t be a dickbag about it.
Sammy’s Wednesday crowd got the victory lap, and I’m stoked they tore the roof off twice. Tonights’ attendees were more pensive, but I think that’s cause they had their brains collectively stomped.
But there’s much about this Gig Review and the night in question that holds a personal resonance. In honesty and full transparency - this one was the litmus test. I was pretty psychologically beaten up and scarred by a horrific sequence of events over multiple weeks prior, and wasn’t sure if I was even up to the task. Being off ADHD medication and the impact of both chronic burnout and acute/severe mental illness has done a number on my workflow. This was a hard one, but I had to give it my all to even try coming close to matching the enormity of Candlemass’ triumphant victory over The Corner Hotel. Twice, apparently, by our own record.
Once again, a massive thank-you to everyone involved, including you, Dear Reader.
It’s night like this that not only remind us that metal music is healing, but that concerts themselves are a conduit to something beyond mental health, psychiatry, work, culture. They’re a gateway to something magical.
Let’s just make sure it’s another 40 years before the encore tour, eh?
LINKS:
[Gig Review]: CANDLEMASS (SWE)/ MAMMON’S THRONE (AUS) Night Two (Author: Sammy ‘Mosh-Lord’ O’Flynn)
Inner-Strength Check Podcast, Episode 86: [Interview] with JOHAN LANDQUIST
Stay tuned for a whole heap more footage from both bands, as well as more absolutely-baller Richie Black Photography in the upcoming Candlemass Gallery of Brewicide!
CANDLEMASS (SWE):
MAMMON'S THRONE (AUS):
Your Mate Bookings:
RICHIE BLACK PHOTOGRAPHY
Inner-Strength Check - Links:
For just $5AUD/month, as a Riff Nerd you’ll gain access to bonus exclusive podcast episodes, have a say in shaping future content, have opportunities to receive giveaways and prizes, gain access to Members-only articles and more!
Thanks to all who’ve helped support us to remain independent and ad-free, cover operational costs and continue supporting numerous creative industries, artists and their communities.
From myself and the ISC Team,
Peace, Love and Grindcore - xoxo.