Elm Street

Vega, Copenhagen - 2014

Text: Tobias Nilsson Photo: Lunah Lauridsen

At short-notice just days before the show, Australian melodic and thrashy heavy metal group Elm Street were added to the bill as a support for Iced Earth. Strange really, as I imagine they must have been part of the entire tour, nothing else would make any sense.
Either way, Elm Street was a completely new name to me so I had no idea what to expect when I entered Lille Vega this Sunday night in the middle of February.

“We are Elm Street, and we’re all the way from Melbourne fucking Australia!”
- Ben Batres (vocals/guitar)


Not a lot of people had shown up at this early hour, but that didn’t bother the band that went straight for the throat – the four guys almost didn’t have time to reach their positions before the first song began, and a welcoming greeting was shouted over the first few bars before Batres began molesting his vocal chords with the lyrics. I have no idea what this first song was, or most of the others for that matter, because Elm Street held such a tempo that it was difficult, nay, near impossible to keep up with what the enthusiastic frontman shouted out.
Performance-wise we were looking at a young band, hungry for a good time. They couldn’t really move what with the cramped space on the small stage, but what they lacked in body came out instead as facial expressions! Batres was intense, but it was guitarist Aaron Adie that seemed the friendliest as between his headbanging he could always be seen with a broad smile on his lips, and whenever he had a hand free he would greet the few fans that stood in the frontline.

“Copenhagen, make some noise!”
- Batres (vocals/guitar)


No, Vega really didn’t a lot of people at this point in time, but during the 30 minutes show there was at least a steady increase in bodies present.
The response seemed to work much in the same way – in the beginning, and despite Batres’ good effort, kept to drinking beer and listening, but as time went on more and more cheers would fill the short time that was spent changing songs, and even though the band never got that precious moshpit that they requested of us, the response in form of cheers and applause towards the end of the gig was quite impressive for a band of this size and reputation.

The two songs that I recall the title of, Elm St’s Children and the ending Face The Reaper, and the rest of them for that matter, were high speed deliveries not without some catchiness, but on the whole nothing really stuck with me after the concert was done. Maybe this just wasn’t so much for me as for a younger generation who have not seen and heard much of this before – don’t get me wrong, there was nothing the matter with the music as much as it just didn’t get under my skin.
What the music lacked, Elm Street tried hard to make up for in their performance, and they didn’t shoot far from centre on this one. I found the band to be energetic yet charming in a way, and they put me in a good mood. The evening was looking bright so far, now it was up to Warbringer and then finally Iced Earth to deliver the goods.

Elm Street

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