Wage War / Rescue Rooms / Nottingham
US Metalcore band Wage War wowed the Rescue Rooms crowd supported by DED
American metalcore rockers Wage War played the Rescue Rooms in Nottingham on Wednesday 8 January 2020 in the wake of the release of their third album ‘Pressure’ in August 2019. Briton Bond (lead vocals), Seth Blake (lead guitar), Cody Quistad (rhythm guitar), Chris Gaylord (bass) and Stephen Kluesener (drums) delivered a high energy set which certainly hit the right note with their fans, who enthusiastically raised the roof, sang along and surfed through the set. Starting off with their 2019 single ‘Who I Am’ the band ran through an impressive set list including a number of tracks from the latest album Pressure, including ‘Me Against Myself’ ‘Low’ and ‘Prison’ and ‘Grave’. Wage War deliver effortlessly, mixing hard raw, unclean vocals one minute, followed by melodic, hypnotic clean clear vocals the next, but balancing the two effectively, ‘Who I Am’ being an excellent example of this. The crowd loved every second, especially as the band played the incredible ‘Johnny Cash’ from 2017’s ‘Deadweight’ album. Returning to the stage for an encore the band delighted the crowd with a brilliant rendition of ‘Stitch’ also from the ‘Deadweight’ album, which has in only 3 years amassed 14 million streams on Spotify.
A great night for Nottingham metalheads
Full setlist: Who I Am, Prison, Don’t Let Me Fade Away, Hollow, Twenty One, Alive, Witness, Grave, The English Channel, Gravity, Ghost, Me Against Myself, Johnny Cash, Low, The Ol Sad, Stitch.
This was a great night for support bands too. First up we were treated to Thornhill, an alternative metalcore band all the way from Melbourne, Australia who treated the crowd to songs from their debut release ‘The Dark Pool’.
This warmed the crowd up nicely for the appearance of Arizona nu-metal band DED. Deserving of a headline show themselves, many of the crowd were here to see DED as much as Wage War. Led by Joe Cotela (vocals) with David Ludlow (guitar), Kyle Koelsch (bass) and Matt Reinhard (drums) they have are visually impressive with Joe Cotela looking like a lead character from Vikings, they treated the crowd to an 8 song set mainly from their 2017 release ’Mis-an-thrope’. Starting with their excellent first track from 2016 ‘FMFY’ which is polished and reminds me so much of Slipknot, they burned through the set with power and energy, the highlights being the anthemic ‘Hate Me’ as well as ‘Dead to Me’ and the finale ‘Anti-Everything’.
DED left the crowd buzzing, and ready for Wage War to unleash the noise….
