Periphery

Valby Hallen, Copenhagen - 2012

Text: Tobias Nilsson Photo: Lunah Lauridsen

Even now, five whole months (almost to the day) after the burning of KB Hallen, the repercussions of this event could still be felt in Copenhagen. Thus, an evening with Dream Theater had been moved to another large-scale sports-hall in the Copenhagen area, Valby Hallen, notorious for its bad live-sound...

This was something that Periphery, the support-band for the tour got to feel at full impact I’m afraid. But let’s take it from the top shall we?
Periphery, a fairly new American act, was formed in 2005 by guitarist Misha ’Bulb’ Mansoor and belong to the somewhat disputatious metal genre known as Djent (named so after the sound a heavily palm-muted guitar makes, which is a defining factor of the genre). Oftentimes digitized sounds also play a large part in the sound of this type of bands, which would explain why Mansoor was sometimes seen hanging out on his on-stage laptop between songs.
But whatever you may feel about the genre as a whole, or Periphery as a band in particular, not much of these special indications of their personalized sound got across to the audience, not after the a bad sound-mix combined with the large and bare concrete building of Valby Hallen had had their way with them anyway. In this echoed up, drum and bass noisy environment you would be lucky to recognize a single song even with a good prior knowledge of the band, something I didn’t even have as this was my first ever encounter with them. Heck, even the vocals were more or less inaudible when the music was playing...

There is in my experience only one thing that can truly save a show with these premises, and that is a band performing their asses off.
Periphery had a bit of disadvantage with this as most of the otherwise large stage was filled up by Dream Theater’s equipment and was covered by a curtain, in front of which Periphery only had a rather thin line of stage to move around on. Now, if this was the actual reason for their way of performing or not I cannot say, but as far as I could see it was only their vocalist, Spencer Sotelo, who really made an effort in this direction with his moveability on the stage, his general chattiness between songs, and his throwing water-bottles to the audience and so on.
The no less than three guitarists, Mansoor, Jake Bowen and Mark Holcomb, didn’t do much difference, neither in sound nor in performance, and neither did stand-in bassist Adam ’Nolly’ Getgood (Red Seas Fire); drummer Matt Halpern seemed lively, but there is little you can do in that position of a band...

The effect of this was directly duplicated in the audience.
Even though there were a lot of people in the hall already by this time, there was little or no action to be seen. For most of the time a gentle nodding to the beat was all that Periphery could hope for, although a bit more noise was raised as Sotelo introduced Icarus Lives! as a song we might have heard before. I hadn’t, but some of the people in the front seemed to react in a familiar way to it...
Sotelo also tried his luck with some standard comments between songs (this was the only time we could actually hear his voice!), like we’re glad to be here and that sort of stuff, but the largest response the band could pull from the audience was when he asked us if there was anyone looking forward to seeing Dream Theater. This both generated loud enthusiastic shouts as well as several raised arms. Periphery’s set ended shortly after this...

From the way the musicians acted in their playing, I got a strong feeling that they were all very technically advanced even though it didn’t really get through to us. Even so, without a proper performance an act isn’t worth much on a live stage, and judging from what I saw and heard here tonight I have no inclination to check this band out further...

Setlist:

New Groove
Letter Experiment
Jetpack Was Yes!
Buttersnips
Icarus Lives!
Racecar

Periphery

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