GIG REVIEW: ALABASTER/ ARCHAEA @ RHYL FRONT ROOM
[by steve rastin]
What is it about Rhyl and Wednesday night gigs?
Ever since that fateful of evening of Wednesday March 27 2003 when Blood & Lipstick shambled into Bar Blu to put on a one-off gig that morphed into a five year weekly residency, the town seems to have had an uncanny knack for turning Wednesday into the new Saturday.
Fast forward a few years and Robin Burberry put on equally popular shows in O’Gradys Irish Bar both before and after Covid, so it’s only in relatively recent times that the town has become as barren as everywhere else in the middle of the week.
It was probably inevitable that Blood & Lipstick, now joined at the hip with We Rhyl Rock You as an Army Of Darkness-type two headed behemoth, would fancy another crack at bringing some life back to the midweek gig scene and so B&L/WWRY duly announced a run of three dates in the smaller downstairs venue at the Front Room to test the water, of which this particular gig was the final chapter.
Actually “final reckoning” might have been a more apt description, following on from the previous two shows where Anyway Champion and Entity had pulled in an encouragingly good crowd, while Echoes Of Obsidian and Firefly played to the proverbial one man and his dog, despite being musical excellent.
As a result the Alabaster/ Archaea double header was the equivalent of an end-of-season play-off and fortunately the gig provided a Hull City rather than a Middlesbrough finale, with a full room and an absolutely crackling atmosphere.
Archaea were first up and got a very good response from the audience despite them not being an obvious musical match for the headliners, a tribute both to the band’s abilities and to the open minded attitude that today’s generation of gig goers seems to have adopted.
The Merseyside quintet play a brand of classic metal that drew at least one whispered comparison in the audience to Trivium – be that as it may (and I’m no expert on the various metal sub-genres) but the overriding impression is of a band who take their craft seriously, who write songs that stand out as individual entities rather than congealing into a lumpen, generic mass and who have a polish and a sheen that elevates them head-and-shoulders above most of their peers on the underground metal scene.
The crowd may have been partisan and there for the headliners, but they gave Archaea a warm response that was as well deserved as it was heart-warming.
Alabaster were one of the stand out performers at the Queens Market Battle Of The Bands in January and in the aftermath they are quickly building a momentum that could well become as irresistible as the career arc that swept Catfish & The Bottlemen to global superstardom a generation ago.
The Bottlemen exert an obvious influence on the Alabaster sound, but these guys are smart enough to take that influence as a basic template and implant their own twists to the base compound, generating an overall sound that is instantly definable indie but also immediately recognisable as belonging to Alabaster alone.
A lot of this is down to lead guitar breaks that owe plenty to classic rock, taking the songs away from any indie-by-numbers pitfalls and demanding judgement on their own merits, all of it performed with a confidence and panache that tells you that these guys know how good they are.
The response was ecstatic as would be expected, but the more telling aspects that underline just how quickly these lads are building up a devoted following lay in the number of punters wearing Alabaster T-shirts and how many of the audience were singing along word perfectly.
Check their socials, there’s going to be plenty of opportunities to see them, not least because they’re adopting a Junebug-esque policy of picking up extra gigs by playing covers, banking the money and reinvesting it into the band for recording and for financing forays beyond Offa’s Dyke and into the gigging badlands of that there England.
And where does this leave Wednesday nights?
The probability is that B&L/WRRY will run a series of Wednesday night shows at the venue during the summer – keep an eye on the We Rhyl Rock You website for an announcement soon.
