Sikth concert review
O2 Academy2 Birmingham in Birmingham, UK
Sun, 09 Nov 2014

Idiom, while not my cup of tea, played with good energy and were a great opening act. Their singer in particular did a good job of warming up the crowd. I had not seen or heard Heart Of A Coward before and I was pleasantly surprised, I well definitely be buying an album of theirs in the near future. Now on to Sikth:

Their sound man was apparently deaf, which is hardly surprising given the utterly incredible volumes that he insisted on pushing the bass frequencies up to. It was physically painful to listen to and drowned out pretty much everything except the most raucous of screams from Mikee.

It would seem that a week of touring is just about enough to destroy Justin Hill’s voice. He was struggling throughout the set to hit the high notes; he took a stab at Peep Show but was mainly held up by the crowd rather than his own ability. By the end he had pretty much just given up; half-heartedly throwing in a few lines here and there.

Highlights included the unexpected performance of the first half of When Will The Forest Speak…, which I never thought I would see live, and a blinding version of Hold My Finger.

Definite lowlight: Pussyfoot. Apparently Dan Foord has forgotten this song, despite playing every night for over a week. He managed to come in a bar and a half early, completely stop in the middle for no apparent reason and generally failed to play in time. This pretty much threw everybody else off their game and consequently resulted in Justin Hill actually apologising on stage for the mutilation. He blamed it on “technical issues”.

I guess my overall experience was not aided by my anticipation, I remember them so fondly and having been told how tight they were only a week ago, I was expecting incredible things. Alas, it was not to be.