DRAGONFORCE and RENEGADE PLAYBOYS • Cavern Club, Exeter, UK, October 11, 2004

My wife and I nearly ran into Herman Li, Dragonforce' guitar wizard, on the way to the gig. It was just a few blocks away and he was kind of hurrying down the street clutching his jacket to him, against the wind. He looked more like a Zen Buddhist guru than a heavy metal idol...calm, calm before the...I wouldn't resist this one...Sonic Firestorm.

The Cavern is Exeter's coolest underground club, and the only one particularly likely to draw bands worthy of international review. It's quite literally underground-you descend the stairs into large chambers reminiscent of Exeter's even more famous underground passages that go back to the Roman days.

Good crowd, a little bit on the young and tough side by Exeter standards, but still very polite. Lots of metal t-shirts, maybe two-thirds of them Dragonforce. Fairly serious drinking that we immediately got into the groove with, and the occasional smell suggesting that one or two of the patrons might be mixing things besides tobacco into their smokes. A decent portion of the crowd consisted of hardcore Dragonforce fans who had followed the band down from London.

Another London metal band opened, the Renegade Playboys. I have to admit that I hadn't previously heard of the Playboys, and so I was pleasantly surprised that they weren't terrible. Better than that, actually...a band with an awful lot of energy cooped up on a stage that barely left room for them to move. Kray-Z D belted out the amped up numbers with a lot of style, and jumped about like a madman within the stage's confines. After a little bit I was noticing Dave's impressive blues licks, and how nicely they were complemented by Sebz' more progressive flash stuff.

They're a party band, that's what they are! Which, in this case, means that there's always gonna be a party wherever they are. Kray-Z D's between-song banter was casual and well received, and they lurched through a set of loud and obnoxious numbers typified by the standout, good humoured rage of “24 Hour Bitch.”

There's a New York Dolls' style appeal to the band, in the sense that they come on balls-out and don't worry about it much. Only Sebz messes with eyeliner or anything, but they give off a sense of a thoroughly self-contained unit not particularly concerned about much other than rockin'. You can kind of get the idea by knowing that Sebz consumed at least two liters of Carlsberg Import (from the can!) during the 45 minute set, and that the band members spent the rest of the evening dancing to Dragonforce and hanging out with the crowd.

They were very well received, but it was a Dragonforce crowd. Crowd intensity just red-lined the minute that Dragonforce took the stage, and didn't let off in the slightest until it was all over.

Dragonforce is unquestionably an impressive collection of musicians. They're very tight and very professional, particularly for a band of this sort. For example, where the Renegade Playboys had difficulty moving around the stage, the ‘force had it all figured out: they moved in and out of the front row in formation: guitarist/singer > guitarist/guitarist, then back, etc.

They had to, there wasn't even enough room onstage for their hair. I've never seen so much hair on a band, not even Skid Row in their glory days! My wife estimated that singer ZP Theart's perm must have cost at least $150, and been rendered some time in the previous 48 hours...but I digress. He's a serious singer who, unlike Kray-Z D for example, didn't botch a note all night.

He also called the crowd “mutherfuckers” so often that it got a little boring. For me, the audience loved everything that he did. All the stadium-style exhortations about “I wanna see some hands,” everything.

It's (mainly) all about the music, anyway, and Dragonforce (pretty much) knows that. For all of their bombasticisms and primal screams and guitar explosions Dragonforce songs are carefully crafted creatures with little left to chance, built on a rock-solid rhythm section.

Dave Mackintosh, in addition to being very steady, launched one of the more creative drum solos that I've heard in some time, and bass player Adrian Lambert...well, just look at the guy, every band needs a guy like that. He's kind of like a puppy dog, he can't believe they're actually playing! That translates to a crowd, believe it.

Keyboard player Vadim Pruzhanov spent most of the gig hidden out of sight, in a corner of the stage that no one could see. He didn't seem to mind, when he finally emerged at the end he was smiling.

They played the album “Sonic Firestorm” pretty much in its entirety. Hell, I don't know, they may have played it entirely in its entirety, it wasn't the sort of show where you're inclined to sit there taking notes. They just launched a sonic and relentless assault upon a desperately willing audience.

Performances of “My Spirit Will Go On,” and “Above the Winter Moonlight” stood out, but it was more a performance to be considered as a whole. I think this is because the songs themselves are broken up into so many segments, breaks between numbers just seem like so much more segmentation. You know they're gonna start coming at ya again!

There can't be many bands out there with two guitarists as gifted as Herman Li and Sam Totman. Normally a review of a band with Totman in it would degenerate into the writer trying to figure out how to explain him, but in this case it's even more hopeless. Totman is a tremendously gifted musician, and his stuff seems to fit the band better-or at least they've done a better job of figuring out how to feature him-but Li is the fan favourite, and the one who demands the most attention.

Li demands the most attention not because his hair is nearly to his ankles, but because he plays so fast that it's difficult to believe...my suspicion was that they were speeding up tapes a bit on the CD, but they aren't. And it's not just that he goes so fast, but that he does so without ever hitting anything less than a perfect note, and that it all appears effortless. The overall effect is like something from a horror movie: an oversized serenely smiling teddy bear with some strange and sonic weapon that mortals are attracted to but can never comprehend.

Given the reality of all that, I wasn't completely entranced by his/their performance. Li rips through progressions that don't always strike me as particularly imaginative (Eddie Van Halen-like, but even more so), and the band, good as they are, doesn't seem to have any idea of what to do while he's going off (listen to some Zeppelin bootlegs, dudes!). The live arrangements aren't as pronounced as the recorded stuff, but it still obviously gets in his way.

I mean, they should at least give the guy a 22 minute stream-of-consciousness solo opportunity somewhere, maybe two or three times. Give him room and either lead or follow, but no matter what, don't be predictable!

So finally they finished up and everyone was either drunk or exhausted, mainly both. Show over, people filing out...Theresa and I decided to stay for another pint, listen to mega-muscular power metal over the great sound system some more. Lights go down, what had been the dance floor, for lack of a better word-where crowd surfing had been going on just minutes earlier, emptied out. Totally emptied out.

We were blabbling about the show, and I was buying some Renegade Playboy CDs from Dave, and generally trying to be coherent.

And then there was a single dancer on the floor, in the shadows. Knew every nuance to every song, wasn't doing anything they'd either teach or be impressed with in ballet class, more kind of bouncing from wall to wall, but gracefully. Completely immersed.

It was Kray-Z D.

That's why I think that the Renegade Playboys ultimately have a higher high-end than even Dragonforce. They're feeling it, man. They may not take as much of it, but they cherish every piece that they can take. They work it all the way through, they know what to do with it and they know that no assembly is required.

This review originally appeared in FM Sound.

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