[Gig Review] ORIGIN (US) w/ MONOLIYTH, SNAKE MOUNTAIN & TREPACIDE (au) @ Singing Bird Studio, Frankston (AU) 13.06.26.
Words/Photos/Footage: Brady Irwin
Artist/s:Origin (Topeka, US), Monoliyth (Melbourne, AU), Snake Mountain (Gold Coast, AU) & Trepacide (Melbourne, AU)
Organised By:Your Mate Bookings
# of Total Snare-Hits Tonight: (Probably) Incalculable
Intro/Shameless Call-To-Action:
A cursory review of Gig Reviews I’m attached to on this site over the past twelve-plus months indicates a pretty heavy leaning towards Your Mate Bookings as a promoter we work with. It’s gotten to the stage where, instead of putting on my most polite of social-worker/Oliver Twist styled “please may I have some more?” emails to other tour organisers, Anthony Blayney’s pretty much just expecting one of us to rock up on doors.
That expectation was rocked a little the night prior by the irony that is moving house - a full day of heavy but careful and safe lifting of household items from trolley, on/off a hydraulic lift and the like. Totally fine, all good. Then, literally as I’m dropping the friggin’ rental truck off to get my car and zoom from Geelong to Stay Gold, the old posterior musculature gave me a good old jolting, painful twitch and a streak of searing, white-hot lancing pain.
Realising after about 10 minutes of careful stretching that sometimes even a neurodivergent with heavy overcompensatory behaviour/unrealistically high self-facing standards needs to call it now and then, take an L, Sammy O’Flynn stepped in and provided a fantastic job of covering a furious night the previous evening.
AND HERE’S A BIG, BOLDED, CAPS-LOCKED INVITATION TO GO READ THE REVIEW ‘CAUSE IT’S GOOD.
CHEERS SAMMY, YA LEGEND!
With both shows in the bag, I want to give HUGE thanks to: Sammy the Backup Reviewer Moshlord, Singing Bird Studios, Stay Gold, Anthony Blayney and Co at YMB, Origin and all supports at both shows and, despite Mr. O’Flynn’s mosh-spectations being dashed earlier in the night (to quote Monty Python, it got better..), punters at both shows.
Right. My turn.
It’s my first time entering Singing Bird Studio, somehow, and despite the abhorrently-Victorian weather I’m feeling comfortable. To those used to growing up in middle-class environs and going from Stockland copy-paste house to mostly fairly clean, amenable venues city-side, the place is probably a cause for alarm.
Not this black duck. I’m befitting of a place like this; regional Australian origin, love me some crusty, grindy music and venues, and absolutely bereft of any kind of class or sensibility. You learn to give less of a toss where a band plays when it’s an 7+-hr trip in either direction to catch most bands. Complaints about the distance to this place make me laugh heartily, especially having nearly done a full circle around the greater Bay region from St Leonards to the ‘Bird. Plus, talk to Sammy about distances; bro drives in for gigs almost every week and lives three hours away in Camperdown.
Essentially, anyone who had complaints about rocking up to not-Melbourne tonight were probably not the target market. Gladly, though, this gig kicks off with an exercise in explosive brain-surgery from a youthful gang of head-crushers.
Opening tonights’ proceedings and immediately blowing the room away, the controlled bedlam begins with an act of…
Trepacide.
For real, it doesn’t feel coincidental that Trepacide is such similar nomenclature to US death-grinders Cephalic Carnage. First of all, there’s a big crossover between both bands’ tech-inflected, off-kilter reinterpretation of death-grind, polishing the gnarled ball of aural spikes with punchy, haphazard riffs which allow for optimum headbanging, minimal safety.
An energetic sparkplug of a band, the Trep collectively ignites into immediate, gnashing physical and musical frenzy. No minute-plus monologues about the scene, no dallying about waiting for ten minutes of ambient intro’s and lastly: no holds barred. Spewing forth from the deconstructed-latte bowels of Melbourne, there’s no bourgeoisie classism on display here. Guttural belcher Thom West fits best, flitting between the baritone growl of a pitbull with a pitch-shifter up to the maddened, throaty ca-caws of a rooster fed something cooked up in a Seaford backyard shed. Working himself up to an immediate sweat is indicative of how hard he and the band are going, especially when you can feel the colds’ pinch from that open shutter-door a few metres behind you in the pit.
Leo Hill doesn’t let the added weight of a bass guitar stop him, either. He chops and cleaves that thing through the air like it’s a hollow-body acoustic, never missing a beat in the process. His playing is tried-and-true to groove and pocket, but there’s plentiful tasty little bass runs and even a couple of solo moments, mingling with tapping, chords and a heap more playbook than the poor sods stuck on the root-note for a hardcore band somewhere right now. Serious chops, flashy playing, sure, but all withheld with a commisar’s watchful diligence to ensure the rhythm-battery strikes hard.
Equally frenzied as their low-end provider, Leo’s fret-wielding companions Jamal Laroubi and Nathan Burgin look more like they’re swatting bees and chopping trees tha dishing out a complex, labyrinthine stream of discordant chords, ridiculously snappy shredding and big, fat, swollen, frantic riffage. The punk-rock allure of a cramped space such as the ‘Bird has its’ benefits, but a frustration of mine on the night was just how darn difficult it was to cop a decent view of the drummers. Thus, whilst occluded largely from my vision, the complete and utter nutcase skinsman Jamie Bailey is readily apparent as an endlessly clattering, thundering force. Tossing the maelstrom about with a sniper’s precision, Bailey commands deafening presence through high-octane double-kicks, stick-shredding blasts and a reggae bands’ worth of time-signature turns.
All up, they’re an incredibly talented crew. Talented not just because of their musicianship but also the fervor and sheer animosity they throw themselves about, restlessly, through the whole set. It’s like someone rocked up to a behavioural treatment centre for troubled youth with ADHD, stole all the meds, threw them some death-grind/deathcore/tech-death and said “enjoy your stimmies, boys”. This crew are lit the hell up and they don’t back down once.
With a discography so far comprised of the Trepacide EP, of particular standout for me was ‘Cranial Immolation’ - talk about reinterpreting old-school Morbid Angel through an Ion Dissonance lens! It’s like a faster, grindier Wallet Inspector with a shirtless barking demon on vocals. You can’t go wrong with that.
Sure didn’t at the time. Evidently not when from front to back, heads sway like an undersea sea kelp forest to those delicious double-kick flourishes over the breakdown riff, and that fun little spindly bass solo that peels off soon after.
As their set comes to a climactic shred-and-blast-filled conclusion, the din is appreciably huge from everyone present in response. I’m talking headliner levels of post-set caterwauling. Sign of an early job bloody well done.
Later, huddling from rain whilst I partake in lung-death with fellow chronic-disease-enjoyers, they’re the rave and shop-talk, evidently having done a bang-up job of pouring plentiful accelerants on a gig-stoke bonfire. Colour us all impressed!
With roughly three years since their inception, Trepacide are relatively new but still criminally understated within Melbourne’s death metal canon. Here’s to hoping these energetic and skilled young maniacs can see to a full-length in future. Get these kids on more local bills, they’ve proven their stripes and then some, if tonight’s any evidence.
Trepacide - links:
(see for ticket links to Flower Field Folly ‘Bong Slut’ (teehee) Single Launch, July 10th @ Bergy Bandroom + Spotify profile)
Jimminy-jillickers! Your Mate Bookings have a knack for appropriate support-slot acts on tour - the Gold Coasts’ Snake Mountain befitting an Origin support like hand in glove. Now for this part, you’ll have to excuse a little detour. It’s not often one even gets the chance to review a Gold Coast extreme metal band. Not even on the Goldy, let alone in Frankston, and supporting an international brutal tech-death behemoth at that.
I kicked about South-East Queensland from late 2007 until the move far south in December 2017, with that time split in halves, first on the Sunshine Coast and then Brisbane. In that time across countless shows, Gold Coast metal was often sparsely represented on SE QLD lineups. Which isn’t to say great heavy music isn’t represented, either. A few examples: sorely-missed metallic-hardcore act asecretdeath (big R.I.P.), veteran groove-masters Lynchmada, etc. Oh, and definitely Puncture Wound - there’s some Goldy-extreme for you!
But that’s those bands, and this right here’s about Snake Mountain. I was lucky enough to catch these sun-kissed firebrands last year during a particularly killer set at Blacken Open Air, a festival nestled in a canyon all the way up near Alice Springs, NT. Of all bands on the first evenings’ lineup, they were the biggest new-find pull for myself and mates that day. A reaction that felt pretty damn unanimous judging by the roaring, fist-pumping feedback from a thoroughly impressed crowd.
Tonight, they’re looking as both ropeable and affable at the same time as the previous encounter. There’s serious stuff being ventilated out of this lot, like any good extreme metal band. It’s ‘free’ therapy.
Look, man - if I had to live on the Gold Coast in any capacity, unironically, I’d also need to be in a death metal band too. A personified manifestation of the listless frustration associated with being crammed in amongst a billion wannabe-Instagram-heroes, aggressive Neanderthal dickheads in backwards flat-brims and all manner of charlatans, vocalist Nev is representative of neither.
He and the band are exemplary of the true Goldy that lies underneath: normal, honest folks just trying their best to eke out a living in a place that is purpose-built for regular incursion and exploitation by swarms of blow-ins year-round.
Just some of that “all I wanted to do was go for a swim and nearly got glassed AND a parking fine” energy:
(via our Youtube Channel)
Dudes are both bouncy, sprightly, stern and grinning. Your average QLD concoction of metal expressions. Pulling a Greg Puciato/Ben Weinman (Dillinger Escape Plan, sans mid-aughts poo-flinging incidents a-la Download), Nev gets particularly punk-gig with it: crawling atop amps, spitting caustic verbal chips mere inches from front-rowers and rousing more rabble than an industrial class-action. Totally menacing, but with that characteristically-Queenslander everyman energy that can sometimes get lost amidst Melbourne’s laneways and more self-conscious posturing.
Outside of the meth-addled growling dog cupping the mic and swaying limbs-akimbo whilst belching his guts out, it’s not like any of the others are slacking off. Crushing breakdown riffs here and there are about the only reprieve in what’s otherwise a sordidly flat-stick affair, punctuated with endless reams of flashy playing by all involved.
This dude - absolute shredmeister. Must’ve been a chimneysweep in his last life? Heh.
Guitarists Jaymes Jackson and Jackson Price form the Jackson Two, pumping out a complex web of riffs and lead trickery that lends just as much a nod to, say, Anata or Necrophagist as it does the happy-go-lucky Queenslander groove orientation. Jaymes in particular has been completely untethered from saving-face, as his is pretty much constantly buried in the frets, including whilst barking his own backup shrieks. I’d be busy with that face too, if I was sledging out this much histrionic two-hand tapping, white-knuckle soloing searing with an overwhelming flurry of tightly-compressed notes. Jackson’s no slouch either, swirling with Jaymes in many trilling lead flourishes, fret and scale hopping, and a whole encyclopedic menagerie of his own whilst holding The Riff squarely intact. Much like their stage forebears, the ‘Mountain’s fret-bearing contingent are clearly well-practiced, well-schooled and also unhappy to pull the tech-death trope of, y’know, just standing there.
Bookending this theatrical display and its’ resultant sonic mayhem, Jared Day slugs out an unrelenting bass-barrage of his own, tone thickly snarling and cutting through (but not dominating) the guitarists’ khZ spectrum. Inflecting his own counterpoints at key moments whilst not going full Ne Obliviscaris with it either, Day helps cement the band in permanent sonic-boom. His skilful and deft rhythmic counterpart in Daniel James has a resume spanning everything from Egyptian themed Lykathea Aflame style symphonic death (Necrostasis, under the pseudonym Zhurion Baltorath), pulverising deathcore (Towers Below) and even heavy/trad viking metal (Thoraway). That curriculum vitae serves well enough to describe what’s going on up there in that crammed corner kit - all of the above and then some, but faster and with plenty of crowd-rousing pocket feel.
More Snakin’ mayhem (via Inner-Strength Check on Youtube).
On the conclusion of one hell of a rip-tearing tech/modern death metal opener (yeah, brevity ain’t something I’m acclaimed for!), the first of so many cheeky grins escapes Ol’ Mate Nev as he barks opener-approval as our cheers die down. “A-hoooo-HOO! Trepacide, eh? What a fuckin’ band. What a gross fuckin’ band”, he sneers to yelps of appraisal from us. Both for the shout-out and the face-melting aural attack, the first of a fierce barraging salvo.
Snobs like myself from adjoining states proudly known for neoliberals unquietly building police-states and closing venues (a-cough-SYDNEY) might scoff and say “Apfsch, yes darling, but they’re Queenslanders - they spell it XXXX because they can’t spell beer! Oh the mirth!” quaffing a sorely-missed Toohey’s New on tap, much to my current chagrin. Fair, but I’ll also point out that it’s Queensland regularly leading the charge with cutting-edge medical research, with Brisbane slowly pivoting a not insignificant investment in areas like biotechnology and the like. They’re not all Campbell Newman [vomits profusely'] up that way. Hence, Goldy tech-death.
“Thank you, Frankston! We’ve got to hitch ourselves a ride up to the Gold Coast, so we’d appreciate it if you checked out our merch!”. See? It’s too hot and humid up there (I literally moved to Victoria just to get even further from humidity) to concern yourselves with dancing about a request. Here’s hoping they didn’t get stuck on the road anywhere in my home-state, ‘cause west of the Dividing Range gets real Wolf Creek-y at night.
Third track “goes out to all the old motherfuckers in the building” and with that, some unceremonious little ratbag gives me a wink and a nod. Yeah-yeah buddy, I’m 37 and balding. Just you wait, bucko - oh. Oh, never mind. Kids’ been dragged by the scruff of the neck backwards into the vortex, the pit responding proper to the chants of “Oi! Oi! Oi!” and “C’m-arn guys, gotta beat Melbourne’s pit!” between glass-gargling lows, piercing mid-and-high-range shrieks. If the cascade of white-hot blasting, chunky grooves and whatnot already had the kids smacking into each other; spurred on by
Our orator joins the pit for the fourth track, not before rhythmically haka-ing with his feet amidst another cheeky leer. “ALRIGHT, cunts! This one’s made for movement. Time to see some stomping!” is a line delivered with such childlike cheek that I find myself Dr. Zoidberg style scuttling along with nearby punters young and old. The song’s as tribalistic in rhythm and tone as Roots-era Sepultura, but it’s been appropriated, hacked and mangled by modern-day tech-death sensibility. Yummy, yummy, yummy, tech-and-slamming-groove in my shredded ears and tummy.
And my god - does that man ever, ever stop sweeping and tapping?! Not saying stop, Jaymes; talk your hysterically-flashy lead guitar, king. And by ‘talk’, I of course mean ‘acidic screams in tandem with your hyperactive orator barking at the kids up front’. Naturally.
“Are you having a good fucking time or what?!” roars Nev with the worlds’ most obvious/over-used frontman line, the one that gets a resounding cheer each time. “Let’s hear it for the mighty Origin!” he barks, our resounding cries muffled by a wall of riffing. It’s different this time, too, spindly arpeggios and barre chords/tremolo that move these northerners a bit too far past the tropics. It’s a blackened-death dime-turn that feels frostbitten, Scandinavian and untethered from its’ Sunshine State songwriting origins, eventually dissipating back into more delicious tech-and-mosh-riff stomp. The pit accelerates with tonights’ all-ages attendance showcasing how the human body looks at all stages of development - when lunging at one another, running puppy-dog laps in circle pits and just general mayhemic behaviour.
In between taking literal notes on my phone and mental notes in my busted head-computer, I made it a point to psychologically stick a task-list item: message fellow ISC contributor Sammy with some news of Origin-tour moshpit redemption.
Ya done good, Frankston!
“Who’s actually seen Origin before"?” Nev quips after another heated amp-climbing spectacle of barking and scaring more reserved Victorian sensibilities for those few minutes prior. Oh, not to mention his little happy dog-lap around the pit, belting gargles whilst giving plenty of us the ol’ Johnathon Thurston shoulder. Yeah, could’ve mentioned guys - a Queenslander with a mic is still one and the same person. These guys basically speak in tackles, so check your Frankston swagger.
“Heh,” Nev grunts with that subtle curled-lip grin usually sported by anime antagonists and very naughty children, to our meagre show of hands. He shakes his head forlornly and cheekily mentions “Should’ve packed some spare undies”. Well, mate, given you’re belting us over the head with all this noise and half the pit is arse-over-tit, it’s a wonder we’re not all packing spares. As the final battering ram breaks through the portcullis, amidst the final tracks’ climactic pre-breakdown crescendo he belts out an impassioned “One last time! I wanna hear you screeeeeam!” and then proceeds basically pull the cockroach-alien stunt from Men in Black: ripping and tugging at his own face, clawing like a madman. The band are nonplussed, focused instead on finishing a super-intense set with that same frantic physical/musical energy, blazing sweeps and thundering blasts.
See, this is the thing. Why pay tens of thousands for some shmuck to rip your face apart on a surgical table when you’ve got these guys down the road to help melt the thing off? Work smarter not harder, I say.
All told, these Queensland tech-misfits leave on hell of an impression on Frankston, the final applause down-scaled but equally fervent as the booming reception they received at Blacken. Two-for-two from me; love me a 100% success rate.
Get these guys down here more often, and sling them some bucks at the merch-desk so they don’t even up stuck somewhere godless, unholy and bereft of hope. Like I don’t know, Kempsey.
MONOLIYTH:
The cloistered barrels, chairs and tables fenced off in the Singing Bird Studio’s open-air ‘beer garden’ is abuzz with chat about the previous act. Sure, there’s the anticipatory-anxiety filled excitement as part of the banter, but it’s always nice to watch interstate bands leave impressionable marks on locals. Trepacide continue to get some verbal nods for their fantastic work as well.
Before too long, as the song goes, the amps fire up once again for a band who haven’t needed to lift a finger to leave a lasting bruise on Victoria. They’ve nestled amongst our venues for decades, an endoparasite that clamps to stages, writhes about on them with furious and breakneck abandon, completely devoid of care about what your thoughts are on the matter.
Veterancy brings with it a sense of cocksure confidence, and Monoliyth have it in spades. Their stage presence funnily enough feels like the lyrics to an Abramelin album: predatory, mirthfully sadistic and dripping with venom. What I love about these guys, though, is said tenure lets them play about with aloofness, punk-rock energy and a smirking, sarcastic, crowd-rousing sense of pure, joyful fun. With a bands’ age comes wisdom and a whole lot of demasking, and if anyone’s going to pump the final primer for Origin, it’s these blokes.
Less Victorian godfathers and more dog-fathers, the crew are a bunch of rabid animals in both musicality and expression. Bunch of pitbulls barking not to get you on edge, but to hustle you into some goddamned movement.
Like a dog, Andrew Parkinson’s figurative teeth are sunk into the torn flooring beneath us, gnashing that shit to pieces with calls for more moshing, more pitting, and more “Haha! Faaaaaaark-yeah-cunts!”’s of pure ‘Straya mosh-approval than a Frenzal Rhomb pub gig. Andrew’s consistent, I’ll give him that. See for ISC-related evidence: Brutefest 2026 review (still healing from that mystery toe injury). Literally the only difference between the two sets is a change from a casual tee to a very Frankston-ready singlet.
“Come on cunts! Get into it!” he roars as the muzzle-flash of twin-guitar tremolo and blastbeats skip the warmup for what feels like the Mortal Kombat finisher - and that’s just the first goddamned song. Folks are going absolutely bananas in the pit at this stage; bodies slamming and swaying, Mexican-waves of punters almost bowled off their feet by a kinetic domino-effect that ripples over even to a mate and I (hi Ash! You’re in the footage bro!) at the left-hand edge of the front.
The banter on offer is just next-level. You can tell Andrew’s relishing the warehouse setting, as well as a chance to gee up the Frankston locals. Plenty of invitations to do it better than Melbourne, and absolute pearlers like “Get a fucking dog up ya! We’re in Frankston! This one’s about moshing, it’s called ‘The Killing Floor’ - you know what to do!”. And they did. By god did they ever. There’s got to be folks who walked out of that pit bloodied and bruised, no two ways about it. The mosh transcends generations to once again demonstrate the absolute primal ferocity us humans are capable of when egged on by loud music and constant rallying cries from Old Mate onstage. They don’t even bat an eyelid with some other Old Mate sledging them with insults and curse-words aplenty. If anyone’s going to not only relish that but quip back, it’s Andrew and Co.
The riffage swirling above all that chaos is both serpentine, spider-like and brutally fast, endlessly churned out on a stringed production-line care of father-and-son dynamic duo Mick Barr (Dad-Guitars) and Zakk Barr (Son-Guitars). If the family that slays together stays together, then these two commit venue-scale guitar-genocide. Paternalistic power imbalances don’t come into play when you and your brood have a very democratic share of performing numerous frantic, nimble solos, nasty bends and harmonics, and riffage that feels like it mines the entire death-metal canonical playbook. OSDM punky charges? Check. Blistering blackened-death tremolo-and-blast? Gotcha. Cannibal Corpse-y swingy, hooky breakdowns? Done. Derivations of The Crown, Dew Scented and other white-knuckle death-thrashers? Check, check, check. It’s all there folks, don’t know what else to say. And it’s proficient enough to technically be tech-death without reverting to tropes.
That Trent Calvert can keep up even half-time is testament to a grip-strength normally reserved for gorillas. He’s as tireless as the other two, rising above his own subsonic din with fingers busy enough to have the calendar week blocked out on Gmail. Fingerstyle bass is my preferred modus operandi, but it often can’t compete with the hard grit of pick-attack without some tonal fenangling. Well, old mate Trent is busting out both hands au naturel and sounds like he’s doing so with one of those novelty-sized made-for-metal-bass picks you could probably bludgeon someone with.
On the topic of bludgeoning, local metal-drumming mercenary is nigh unstoppable. Every drummer tonight has showcased a ridiculous talent for blending hyperblasting and groove, but Tim Wright (also of Munitions, Erebos, Abyssal Tomb) flexes his octopoid arm-flailing assault with the practiced ease of a session-muso doing AC/DC covers. What little I can catch of the bloke expression-wise is either essentially shrugging it off or burning with focused intensity. But he not only keeps up, he flourishes. Flat-stick blasting to swingy cymbal riding through to tom-pounding rolls and fills and back again - or off somewhere totally different. I’ve been really impressed with the dynamicism on offer from all drummers so far tonight, and Tim’s absolutely got the…. Wright stuff. Heh.
Raising his tin like a holy scepter numerous times throughout, between tracks Andrew gives a hoi-hoi to the headliners: “Here’s to the most brutal cunts out there! Origin!” - a lacklustre response from a crowd too self-injured evokes another little quip: “Nah? Yeah? Origin’s ‘just alright’ then? Good. That’s what we aspire to be, ‘just good’!”. Everyone in room knows that little self-deprecating nod’s sarcastic, particularly as XXXX rips us a new one. A processional that marches from a blistering, hyper-speed, tremolo-tinged assault into grooves so chunky you, the Scottish terrier advertising Chump and Jungle Rot can all carve it. “Come on, you fucking sick cuuuuuuuunts!” our frontman roars, invoking a desperate and frenzied mosh over one hell of an OSDM breakdown.
“We haven’t played Frankston for a long time and dude, this is sick!” he grins at us weary, bloodshot but excitable punters. “Frankston fuckin’ represents!” he beams, smirking at the cheeky local who pipes up with a hearty “get fucked!”.
Ah mate, that’s almost as open an invitation as the guy wearing that banana-suit to hardcore gigs. “Rip that cunt apart!” he grins. “Wake it up, motherfuckers, come on!” Andrew urges over a final caustic and deliciously frantic death metal punisher. Right as the riff tips to that all-important outro breakdown sendoff he shouts out an “are we warm? Great! We’re all being responsible and fun!” as The Dummy-Thicc Riff hits hard, contorting into one final complex string of techy old-school death before the whole shebang is over.
The pit literally takes a moment to cease momentum, punters swirling and pushing, all of us hooting and hollering like a colony of lost howler monkeys. Vene, vidi, vici is stamped on the blokes’ foreheads by the metal gods as they shake hands, raise tins and grin away yet another Victorian arse-kicking.
At times, I truly wonder if my Gig Reviews could be used as some experimental form of interrogation somewhere like Guantanamo Bay. Mercifully for you, dear patient Reader (or Reader who simply thumbed past all that other jazz for the final act - boo-hiss, support the scene etc), you can rest assured that we’re now on the final leg of this type-a-thon.
Thing with these guys, chat, is that you’ve got to dispense with a lot of the usual literary tropes, even the metal-journalism specific ones. Origin is a band where the usual pseudo-spiritual whimsy of ‘being taken on a journey’ does not apply. At all. This isn’t an excursion, it’s a fucking orbital bombardment a-la Warhammer 40K, Battletech or any other fiction where turning a populace to nothing but irradiated glass is a canonical feature. They don’t feel like a live band, they feel like a mechanistic force applied to ravenously hungry brutes of incomparable musical skill.
So many years listening to these guys and being a mixture of curious, intimidated and gleeful at once. For me, Origin’s music represents something that to anyone else is a source of aspiration, frustration, admiration and many moments of head-shaking awe. And that’s while kicking it at home listening to it on speakers.
Yeah, I regularly playfully cuss my tangential, overly-wordy and pretentious writing style out in my own reviews. But this? These guys?! Both Sammy and I had the same exasperated lament when it came time for each of us to get in the chair and start writing/typing.
I want to open the review of their set with something fairly stock-standard but also with full, serious sincerity. There is nothing I could possibly hope to write, nor anyone else, that could encapsulate what an Origin set is like as a personal experience. Footage gets you about the same distance, so does punter feedback. If you haven’t seen these guys live or you missed this time around (which we know Melbourne did since ticket-sales were overall pretty shy), throw mine and all other reviews in the bin.
Nothing - and I mean nothing - properly addresses the unrelentingly brutal, clinically-precise and outrageously punk-rock experience that is these Kansas-based madmen. If Dorothy clicked her heels and dropped into Topeka on our timeline, we’d still be picking up tiny mince-meat pieces of her and Toto to this day.
The closest apt descriptor you can use to summarise what transpired is… eldritch horror. I’m talking Lovecraftian. You sit there steely-eyed, inwardly confident that you’ve been there and seen it all when it comes to harsh, experimental, boundary-pushing brutality. And yet, friends, despite my penchant for being verbally assaulted by sheer noise in the name of fun, dopamine and masochism, there’s no figuring out these guys. They’re a complex, colossal, unyielding Entity.
Which makes me insatiably glad that our first face-peeling beatdown piped through brutal tech-death was none other than a cut from that album, one I feel gets overshadowed by tech-death fans’ eternal (and well-warranted/understandable) glorification of Origin.
Facing the drumkit and lunging, writhing back-and-fro like a juiced-up hardcore bands’ frontman, Jason Keyser is visibly ravenous to get going, impatiently awaiting under blue lighting for the set’s sample to finish so he can turn around and bust faces.
Of all things, it’s a high-pitched wail from little humble tin-can astromech R2-D2 from Star Wars that acts as the starter gun for one hell of a furious, frantic and unrelenting set.
“Not a single one of you should be standing still, you know exactly what to do - let’s dance!”
(via our Youtube Channel)
Incredible. Just freaking incredible. As soon as the needle drops, it’s an immediate ‘Expulsion of Fury’ of the highest order. This one is not only my favourite track off the brilliant and underrated Entity, it’s one of my favourite Origin tracks ever. I had to fight hard with every inch of my physical being not to thrash my phone wildly (or indeed just piff it across the damn room) with the sheer urgency, chaos and speed that erupted mere feet from my face.
“Time has come/For an end/to the centre of liiiiiiiiiiife!” Keyser barks in his idiomatic gravel-eating-canine low growl and methed-out hell-parrot high shriek. You know a vocalist has power behind those pipes when every utterance is not only as clear as the studio material, but now comes with a searing throat-tearing gargle to boot. My oesophagus just about clenches up just thinking of trying to replicate it. Hence why he’s on the stage and not us.
As if the vocals weren’t insane enough.
Again - showing my bassist-bias but come-the-fuck-on, mate. It’s goddamned Mike Flores. The man who looks Paul Ryan’s insanely ballistic, time-defying hyperspeed sweeping on this blistering intro and deigns to match him note-for-note fingerstyle. Every bassist in the room had a turn later walking up the beaten wreck he gave an absolute hiding to ask about the technique. He was kind and patient enough with us to show how, but tell you what - not even going to pretend to try that once my bass is unpacked at the new place. The right hand basically rolls in a dual sweeping motion, all fingers guns blazing on both hands.
Doable with a light touch, but this man has more punishment in store for that thing than the collective detentions of all Bart Simpson’s wrongdoings since 1989. Compressed into one set. Over a whole tour. That thing suffered abuse, and I not only let it happen, I was a willing, spellbound participant.
Aghast, horrified, probably aroused and definitely, definitely in awe, I tear my eyes away from the low-end hero and damn near shake my head. That segue from the bouncing, typewriter-clacking efficiency of the heinously, digustingly talented man-machine John Longstreth on drums, right into the speedy tremolo run with even more tightly-coiled sweeping because, well, fuck-you I guess? Goddamn, we’re less than a minute in and I’m already feeling like Paul’s clocked more notes played than the entirety of the time I’ve ever held a guitar in my hands combined.
As the cacophonous din settles into that gurn-inducing groove and the pit’s rallied, the shift to a bouncy stomper of a solo chord progression has the crowd ready to pounce.
Once the band joins back in for further expelling of fury, widdling out that djent-on-Pablo-Escobar’s-whole-stash hammer-on/pull-off riff (complete with Keyes dog-barking in tandem), I’m just about involuntarily pawing my hands at my own face and screaming in wanton abandon from the sheer belief. I feel like a giddy Karen watching The Beatles in their heyday. I’m just straight-up floored. So much so, that the momentum of the pit and our collective frontal lobes needing to catch up gives the first expulsion of applause-fury a second or two delay.
They’re literally playing faster and harder than we can process it, and that’s the way it largely remains outside of countless thick, sledging, meaty riff-hammers that bludgeon us after the clinical incision from these inhuman psychopaths.
When I say psychopath, I don’t necessarily mean the rage-induced maniac wandering hallways with an automatic weapon, although Jason’s expression, impassioned and numerous calls to spin the circle-pits harder, bash each other more relentlessly etc do have that flavour. Nah, I’m talking the sneering, cold, unyielding presence of men who’ve deliberated on their craft for many, many hours, just to regurgitate their deathly precision on us with a huge side-order of reactive, fluid and restless physical energy.
That one track was worth the admission alone. I’d drive from 35 minutes east of Geelong and damn near loop-de-loop all of the Bay/s again no questions asked, were the gig just that. Mercifully and unmercifully at the same time, that’s very far from all she wrote, folks.
The second cut stabs like the grinding knives of a hundred of those multi-limbed octopoid android-caretakers from The Matrix - unceasing, whirring, viciously pulling us apart through sheer and absolute sonic destruction. It’s a hellish uptick in brutality, a moment where with no small amount of trepidation one realises ‘Expulsion’ was just the palate cleanser, the taste-tester.
“Frankstoooooon…. FRANK-STOOOOON!” Keyes bellows over one of so many impossibly-tight, intricate riffs, the first of innumerable little circular motions with his free hand indicating what he wants.
Every damn chance this guy gets, everywhere there’s a chance to whip us poor saps into further and further violence, he calls for it. I mentioned Warhammer: 40K before, right? Mate, they’d love you in the Imperial Guard. No man would dare abandon his post again, and it seems although bloodied and battered, the chimpanzees wreaking havoc in the Warp-tear (oh, sorry, moshpit) are communing with Hell itself.
“Thanks for joining us on this fine Saturday evening,” Keyes croons with a starkly juxtaposing air of genteelman to us breathless, wide-eyed reprobates. “It’s been a long time since we last graced the shores of your island nation. And… Frankston….” he purrs in a teasing tone, “your reputation precedes you! We’ve been around for oh, 35 years, 50 years, something like that” [no Seinfeld bass clank or rimshot? aww].
“Whole lotta young heads out there… let’s hear it for the headbangers up front!” [we cheer]. “Now let’s hear the moshers!” he says to even more frenzied wails. “We want the perfect trifecta - headbanging, moshing, and stage-dives. I want to get at least one stage-diver on this next one, alright?! Grab someone who hasn’t been pulled into the pit, get them in there or up here onstage.”
This right here, folks. This is what sets Origin apart. Sure, Beyond Creation and a whole raft of other progressive, brutal and technical death metal bands can play, and even go hard with their performances. But they don’t often incite a level of crowd-participation that starts at a dive-bar grindcore gig in the 90’s and only get more pressured about it as the night continues.
Hell yeah. Our brutal tech-death heroes are also proper punks, too!
Jason ekes out the last of his oratory over the thundering clatter of the drum-beasts’ kit, a tight martial flourish of snare that ‘eases off’ into an even more punishing dududududududududu of double-kicks so fast they almost become monotonal. Flores relents for a pretty damn rare moment of breathable-air on the bass, whilst Paul’s back to his histrionic, head-spinning sweep introductions bag of tricks. I feel like if you met this guy on a Tinder date, he’d be pulling blinding-fast two-hand tapping and sweeps without even having a guitar in his frigging hands.
Over that controlled demolition Keyes roars: “This one’s from Chaosmos, it’s called ‘Panoptical’!”
Are you messing with me right now, mate?! That’s another album-fave just casually dropped into the setlist. How’s a man supposed to be.. oh, who am I kidding, gig reviews are anything but objective. Needless to say, I’m rasping with the hoarse screams normally reserved for the most pissed-up of soccer hooligans at a FIFA Grand Final, and the braying hoots and howls of my floorside kin do little to puncture through the sheer loudness of it all. Goddamn, if Singing Bird doesn’t exacerbate the overwhelm through sheer acoustics alone.
Legitimately, I’m feeling tortured. In the best way possible. After decades of gigging and wilfully throwing myself at being screamed at to fast music, only now does a band make it seem so ridiculous to even be in the room, so utterly devastating that I’m feeling both like I’ve discovered some new masochistic kink AND like I honestly want to bolt for the door. I don’t, because us metalheads are weirdos with a penchant for self-schadenfreude, but I wouldn’t begrudge a soul in the room for stepping out and kicking back to watch from outside the shutter door. It’s that intense, that overpowering.
We get all of a few seconds’ break before it’s time for the guys to DOOM: Eternal this place and straight up rip-and-tear once again. Track titles start to feel irrelevant, as does even my usually frantic and studios punching of the odd note into my smartphone. It’s just bedlam. A maddening, annihilating wall of noise that feels birthed from a malevolent, semi-organic nanite/insectoid swarm. Truly, it’s like witnessing science-fiction in action. And the pit? Let me put on my most culturally-appropriating mobster hat and suit and give you a big ol’ hand-flick while I say “Ahhhh, forget-about-it!”. That place is a writhing viper-pit and scene of total ruin, at the same time. Folks struggle to keep up with their own will to slam, urged incessantly by a shrieking taskmaster just feet away. It’s like brutal death metal Tabata, F45 or some other high-intensity cardio training. I feel breathless just watching it.
They’re a grateful lot, too, though. Keyes hanging out over Flores’ neck as he pummels out the 900 billionth too-fast-to-live-or-die two handed bass sweep, chiming in with “Let’s hear it for Mr. Mike Flores!”. Yeah look, already outed myself as a fanboy - damn nearly lost my voice with the harpy-like shriek that erupted spontaneously from a throat permanently hitched and scuffed by the battering of all this sonic friction. Whilst that’s going on, Paul’s off in his own little world of piercing what feels like the sound and light spectrum with white-hot, tinnitus-inducing harmonics, bends that’d make a Jamaican blush and shredding that defies the term itself. ‘Vaporising’ is more apt. Needless to say, our drum-king stuck in the corner is emitting a maelstrom of hyper-blasts, thudding grooves and taut, frantic fills in a sleet of stick-smashing savagery.
It’s mental. It’s ballistic. It’s nearing too much and a drug I want shot into my eyeballs forever at the same time. I’m enraptured. I’m overwhelmed. And to quote McDonald’s: I’m lovin’ it.
I could continue the literary torture on and on, painstakingly pulling apart the surgically-precise intensity and how it meets with a ferocious, almost oafish swagger at the hands of these confident brutal-tech veterans. Proper penance absolutely must be paid, of course:
‘Saligia’ features a new level of outrageous soloing that threatens to break barriers of physicality and time alike, a lengthy sojourn so intense I’m almost gritting my teeth by the end of it.
Keyes playfully quips about playing a ‘slow song’ leading into the very-thinly-veiled and absolutely sarcastic ‘gotcha’ that is ‘Thrall: Fulcrum:Apex’. The absolute searing uptick in aural butchery on this one threatens to hit rev-limiters across the room, a collection of stunned mullets aside from those electing to deal with the noise by body-slamming in the pit.
A wall of death…. that starts before the track even begins.
Paul: “Can we get a little house-lights on this shit? I want to witness this shit.” (ruh-roh, Shaggy!)
Jason: “You’re looking at me a little bit sceptical, you think this is maybe a little bit cliche to be doin’ walls of death, but we do it a little bit differently. This isn’t running, punching, kicking at the breakdown. This is no fuckin’ deathcore bullshit.”
“We know, Frankston, that you’re so fuckin’ brutal, we can have the wall of death before the song even fuckin’ begins” he exclaims to a rolling snare. This is the Origin SILENT Wall of Death. We don’t start until you meet in the middle, we go by your cue - you ready?!”
The Audience: [garbled cheers and howls, precipitating full Donkey-Kong Mode brutalising of each other]
The Evidence (not verbatim but you dig):
See Also:
The goddamn promoter himself, Mr. Anthony Blayney, caught up in the ruckus enough to be headbanging fiercely upfront and getting crowd-surfed like many others, basically across the circumference of the pit:
How many death metal bands do you see whipping their own tour guy into enough of a frenzy that he’s launching off the stage like a kid at a hardcore gig? What was it Anth, three crowdsurfs at least? Nice. Look at the kid. Look at that cheeky grin. Your Mate…
“Paint me like one of your French corpses.”
We’ve been stripped of our imperious, snooty metalhead armour, exposing the raw ape underneath. Our brains mashed of the part key for maintaining an aloof, pompous-ass crossed-arms sneer, we become a head-swinging, pit-forming mass of mindless, joyous automatons.
‘Decolonizer’ melds the groove influence heard more during the support acts into a tailor-made track for rousing the crowd into some new, completely primal and rabid tier of moshing. It’s a glass ceiling our heads get smashed through with an agitated, excited and encouraging frontman commanding, barking, thanking as folks truly push their bodies to the limit.
‘The Aftermath’. That’s it. That’s all. Listen to it. Enough said. No description required. Just imagine that shit hitting you in the face unironically but with the added amplification of a venue, real people somehow pulling that off. Mental. Beyond mortal comprehension. Seriously.
A final call to get the crowd-surfing ramped up to a new height is obeyed with thrall-like stupor, weary maniacs darting on and off the barrier-less stage like so many salmon into the meaty paws of pure brute-force.
Then suddenly, mercifully and regrettably at the same time, it’s over.
Origin are hanging out in the merch room giving everyone free reign to chat. I stumble out sober as a judge, one tinnie long out of my system, but I feel drunk. Bludgeoned. Aghast. Like I need to go home and either play my bass twelve hours a day from now on, or set my instruments on fire forever.
I get a patch signed, chat to Keyes who’s friendly and affable as the rest of them, mumble my praises to the demigod who just played ten bands’ careers worth of notes on his battered bass, curse expletives and sheer what-the-fuck-dude-ery at the relentless drumming cyborg posing as a ‘human’ named John Longstreth (pfft, yeah right. I got you made buddy, no human plays like that). Paul’s nowhere to be found and neither is my prefrontal cortex - it lies shattered in a billion pieces across the venue, vacuum-blasted out of my cochlea like an astronaut from an airlock.
The decompression takes me a while.
Like, days.
I’m in a post-gig reverie that feels like a psychological hyperbaric chamber.
My vape lingers in my hands as I’m stood in a slow trickle of cold rain and lashing wind. I’ve completely forgotten why I even shuffled back outside, yet again, in the first place.
Forget ADHD. I’m now like a late-stage dementia patient with serious neuropsychological damage.
Thoughts don’t form. Opinions amount to “Fuck…” and “What…. the fuck….?” [positive, obviously].
The disbelief remains to this day. I doubt it’ll ever fully mold to a cohesive belief, and that’s fine.
You think you know ‘heavy’.
You pride yourself on taking aural punishment via extreme-metal on a regular basis, your sadomasochism likely inflected with some kind of metalhead/punter ego.
You think you’ve witnessed the upper-limits of both biomechanical precision and sheer pissed-off punk fury.
Then you walk into a venue for an Origin gig - and you never come out the same again.
inner-strength check - links:
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