Download 2009 was the first time I’d ever since any bands perform live and Lacuna Coil were one of the main highlights of the weekend for me, which meant it was time to look out for more performances from them in this country. Fortunately after a few weeks it was announced that they were playing a few venues over a few days so we snapped up some tickets quickly for their performance in Camden.

On to the performance, it must be noted that Dirty Little Rabbits cancelled this performance and their appearance at Sonisphere in order to finish the debut album. Thank God! I checked some of their videos on Youtube in the run up to the gig, and it didn’t look good! The Defiled and Cancer Bats filled the void.

The Defiled
Not a bad performance yet not a good one either, but had enough promise for me to check out their stuff the following day. They were quite amusing really, the band consisted of:

- A bassist that kept climbing up stuff.
- A mask-wearing guitarist, was he worried about the Swine Flu pandemic?
- The keyboard player that just didn’t know what to do with the keyboard. Was he going to throw it into the audience? Was he going to put it down? Did he actually play it in the end?

Not quite sure how well they came off to the audience, but from what we could see around us they weren’t very popular. Someone loudly exclaimed “I don’t think anyone knows who these guys are!”. To be fair their name wasn’t even hanging from the curtain behind them.

Oh, and let’s not forget the failed attempt at getting the audience to form a moshpit.

The Defiled

Dead By April
In my opinion these guys were the strongest support act by far. Their material was a lot more melodic and seemed to comprise of a nice fusion of both metal and pop.

I thought I’d post a particular image above of the group. Namely a pic featuring the “the fit one” (bassist) as Sarah so nicely puts it!

Dead By April

Cancer Bats
These guys were so… so… incredibly bad! (IMO – don’t kill me! ) And because they were so bad their set just seemed to drag on, and on, and on… in fact I believe they had the longest set of the three to my disappointment.

It was one of those performances where you really dread being up the front. I just wished I packed an umbrella because you just would not believe how much spit and sweat came raining down from these guys!

Cancer Bats

Lacuna Coil
What can I say? They were the band we were going for and their performance was fantastic! The set consisted of songs from Shallow Life, Karmacode and Comalies and went on for just over an hour. The only downside is I wish they’d mix it up a little and play some of their older material, majority of their set were songs played at Download the month before. Aside from this I could not fault them.

Particular members of the crowd on the otherhand… The set went on for a good half an hour before there was a load of forced pushing in and then we found ourselves on the edge of a moshpit (not through choice) and I must’ve been elbowed gawd knows how many times, I just found myself occupied in the end with pushing all of these guys back into their little moshpit while shielding Sarah and the girl next to us.

Oh, and Sarah managed to get one of Maki’s picks. Awesome times!

Lacuna Coil