IN FLAMES & KREATOR – Brisbane, Australia 18th February 2024

admin February 20, 2024 Concert Reviews

The Klash Of The Titans is a touring roadshow, featuring two radically different giants of European metal. Sweden’s In Flames helped start the melodic death metal revolution, while Germany’s Kreator burst forth from the Rhineland in the 1980’s with their fearsome, precise thrash metal.

It’s actually such a stark contrast in styles, that the audience tonight is a diverse bunch, from greying headbangers in battle jackets to the types of youthful revellers who swarmed into the Brisbane Exhibition Grounds for Knotfest last year.

Geographically close, the venue tonight is the far more intimate Tivoli theatre, which nonetheless is greeted by a snaking queue of black T-shirts as the doors open. Once inside, it doesn’t take long for festivities to proceed, kicking off with the mighty Kreator. Red light imbues the stage with menace, as wretched souls are literally hung by the neck from the stage beams and a giant inflatable likeness of mascot Violent Mind glares malevolently at us all.

But before we can appreciate the stage props, the foursome get straight to business with the title track from most recent album Hate Über Alles, the latest in a string of killer records since the band returned to their classic thrash sound. Lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Miland “Mille” Petrozza is still a powerhouse thrash singer, his voice as authoritative and commanding as ever. He even gets the crowd to participate in “old-school moshing” as crowd surfers and circle pits get busy throughout a set that is epic, bombastic and yet straight to-the-point.

Jürgen “Ventor” Reil, the band’s other original member, is still an outrageously fast and technical drummer after all these years, while Finnish guitarist Sami Yli-Sirniö sweetens Mille’s machine gun riffs with dazzling, melodic solos. Relatively recent tracks like 2017’s Hordes Of Chaos frequently get the crowd as excited as the old classics, but there is a special type of joyous insanity among us all when they take on the ‘80s thrash mayhem of Betrayer, Flag Of Hate and barnstorming finale Pleasure To Kill.

The aforementioned older members of the audience step back a little to let the younger folk closer to the stage for In Flames, their more youthful following certainly down to sound more than age – after all, while not around as long as Kreator, it’s easy to forget that In Flames have been in existence for over 30 years. The evolution of their classic melodic death metal into metalcore and alt-metal paths makes their back catalogue sound almost like the building blocks of much modern metal – and what a treat hearing it straight from the source.

Anders Fridén is his usual good-natured self as frontman, and while his trucker cap and flannelette shirt make him look the singer from a southern rock band, he nails his vocal repertoire of death growls and soaring, emotive cleans.

Tonight, it’s Kreator who bring the riffs, but it’s In Flames who bring the anthems. The “this is the feeling I have been waiting for” refrain from I Am Above is belted out by audience members, bouncing up and down to the chorus’ snaky groove. Songs from the more back-to-roots latest album Foregone also go down a treat, particularly Snake Of Slow Decay and the galloping Foregone Pt. 1.

There is a good range of oldies as well, like the frenetic chug of Pinball Map, the rippling solos and guttural vocals of Food For The Gods and even an epic rendition of Behind Space from their 1994 debut Lunar Strain. But whatever they try, it sticks – from the electro-metal of Cloud Connected to the furious set closer Take This Life, everyone is having a good time.