Coheed And Cambria, Closure In Moscow at Billboard

When my illustrious colleague Andrew Saltmarsh got home from seeing Coheed And Cambria in Brisbane, the only thing he could say about the show was how bad the opening band were. Without banging on about it, it's pretty fair to say that they were one of the worst support bands he's seen.

Intrigued, I went to work finding out who they were, and if they would be opening the Melbourne show as well. Turns out it was Closure In Moscow, a Melbourne band, so I would be seeing them at the show I went to that Tuesday night at Billboard.

I've known of Closure In Moscow for a while through working at Fist2Face, but I'd never heard their music nor seen them live, so I went to the show with a pretty open mind. While I didn't dislike them nearly as much as Salty did, they're really not my thing.

It's almost as if they've decided that full, layered instrumentation and screaming vocals are the key to success, but haven't figured out that you actually need to write interesting compositions to get anywhere. All their songs sounded the same, striving for the Coheed And Cambria sound, but came off decidedly less pleasurable than the original and the best. I suppose it's ironic that a band trying to be like one of the music industry's most original could sound so derivative.

Billboard was completely packed, so Carmen and I struggled to find room to move amongst the crowd, let alone somewhere she could see the band well enough. We ended up staying towards the back and having to look through a mass of heads to see anything, which turned out to be a blessing with the lighting as blinding as it was. I enjoyed being able to block out the halogen blinders with the afro in front of me.

Musically, Coheed have a chaotic live show. Everything seems sped up a tiny bit from their records, and playing riffs, notes and melodies exactly right doesn't seem to be a requirement. But given that, each member was still perfectly locked in to one another, so it didn't sound sloppy at all. It was really quite amazing, almost like watching The Mars Volta on stage.

Obviously one of my major fascinations was with Claudio Sanchez's hair, and how it can turn from a gargantuan afro into almost nothing with the use of a single hair-tie, but his voice was also relatively well-kept. Thanks to the pair of female backup singers he didn't have to hit anything too high, which was clearly a good decision. Chris Pennie (formerly of the Dillinger Escape Plan) seemed completely at ease playing everything, and though I never saw Coheed with Josh Eppard, I can't imagine he was anywhere near the drummer Chris Pennie is.

They concentrated on the "single" material from their latest albums more heavily, although there were a few surprises thrown in. As a fan of In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3 more than any of their other releases, I was slightly disappointed that I only heard a couple of songs from that album, but since it's five years old now I can't really complain about that. Fans of No World For Tomorrow would certainly have been pleased with the setlist, as would Iron Maiden fans be pleased with the fact that they did a really cool cover of "The Trooper".

But it was the encore that had me completely flummoxed.

After a 10-minute solo section - which was cool for the first five minutes - each member quietly left the stage, one every couple of minutes, until Pennie was left alone on stage to play a drum solo. I've got to admit that it was pretty good, as far as drum solos go, but by that stage a lot of people were ready to leave. Some, in fact, were leaving.

The band came back on for one final song together, but I felt like it was sort of an anti-climax. The solo section could easily have slotted into the middle of the first part of the show, freeing up more time for some of the "must-play" songs in the encore.

But all-in-all I was really impressed with how well they played such difficult material in a live setting, and I'm certainly regretting the fact that I missed their 2005 tour in order to see Kanye West.