Live Review: Uprising 9 - Main Stage
23rd May 2024
Words: Dan Barnes
Photos: Tim Finch
Break Them and Pryma had already done their thing on the Very Metal Art stage by the time the Main Stage began, opening up a stacked bill from all corners of the Metal world. Local Leicester lads, Fractions have the honour of being the day’s first act, bringing their crushingly heavy attack back to Uprising. Their hard-hitting death-infused progressive bludgeoning is somewhere between Periphery and Meshuggah, with them aiming blows into both the brain and the gut. It’s modern brutality that has no let-up and an ideal way to start the main stage programme.
I believe I owe Foul Body Autopsy’s Tom Reynolds an apology, after naming him as the player of the most outrageous guitar imaginable when Nagasaki Birth Defect hit the stage at Grind Before Death back in February. Turns out it wasn’t him, and I looked quite the ‘nana. But it most definitely is him tearing up the main stage in Leicester this afternoon, shredding brutality against crushing backing tapes. Most recent EP, 2024’s The Discovery of Witches gets a selection played, along with the brutal and the melodic for one of the most interesting sets of the day. Harsh lights and the liberal distribution of plectrums, alongside destructive riffs were the order of the day, but the set just wasn’t long enough.
Norwegian progressives Mayfire were here to show Sleep Token how to be both mysterious and metal at the same time. Dressed as dark monks and making their debut UK festival appearance, the masked mob have only their 2023 album, Cloudscapes and Silhouettes to draw from, but do so in a remarkably engrossing way. There’s very much an Eighties feel about the band’s music, mixed with Classic Rock and performed with precision; there’s even a folky-feel to the closing, anthemic The Age of Kings.
While we’re considering theatricality – and without wanting to be bias, just because we’re from the same town - but Ward XVI arrive to play a truncated show, compressing all the storytelling magic into a tight thirty-minutes. The whole entourage is boiler suited for We are Legion’s bombastic chants; the Inmates have brought their stage props with them this afternoon, with the cage of the asylum being swifty erected. Psychoberrie makes the first costume change of the set, emerging for What’s In the Box’s nursery rhyme opening, without boiler suit and dressed more for the scandalous subject matter of the Id3ntity album. It’s Kiss and Alice Cooper on a budget, with the overblown theatrics modified for a medium-sized festival stage.
Another costume change – Psychoberrie really is the scene’s Taylor Swift – for the debauched and hedonistic Macaberet. Cry of the Siren is the only tune that pre-dates the Id3tity record and the main hall is chocked full of Ward XVI shirts, wielding inflatable chainsaws; the fiery and full-on Blood is the New Black, after which another engrossing show is sadly over.
Black Metal artists The Sun’s Journey Through the Night is a popular addition to Uprising’s bill. With an equal amount of their own theatricality, Sun’s Journey…’s show starts with a swelling introduction, cold riffs and demonic rasps. The combination of raw black metal, ambient passages and bombastic symphonic elements makes for a blasphemous sermon of icy blasts and sweeping orchestration, spewing unholy, grim theatrics. Singer, No One swings a light around, Deimos builds a huge percussive framework for guitarists Aphonos and Satis. The obvious point of reference was the band’s dark rite at Damnation 2023’s Night of Salvation and it feels The Sun’s Journey Through the Night would benefit from a detour back to Manchester sometime soon.
The closing trio on the Main Stage takes us back to the early noughties alternative metal scene for nostalgic trip down Memory Lane. Gibraltar-based Breed 77 make a return to the Academy and to Uprising, following their 2024 festival appearance, and last year’s Bloodstock show with Undeath and Static-X, showing that there’s still a huge hunger for their hard rock/ nu metal/ flamenco hybrid.
Releasing half-a-dozen albums over the space of a little over a dozen years at the start of the millennium, the band’s set is a wander through their formative years with 2004’s Cultura record, World’s on Fire and La Ultima Hora later in the set; the title track of Insects opens the show, newer tune, End of the Line shows the band still have the desire to intertwine hard-edged rockers with alternative sounds. The twenty-year old Blind is bookended by another newer tune, Outside, a dirty riff and a driving rhythm suggesting Breed 77 still have much left in their creative tank. The cover of The Cranberries’ Zombie, which takes the antiwar theme of the original and runs it through with fist-in-yer-face guitars and a defiant attitude.
There was a time when Essex’s InMe were slated for greatness. Back in the early days of the century they could be found rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ministry, Marilyn Manson and Iron Maiden at the inaugural Download festival in 2003. Constant presence, Dave McPherson is no stranger to Uprising, having played here as a solo artist as well as with his band, it’s like a meeting of old friends as they step onto the Academy’s stage.
Celebrating thirty-years as band, InMe might not have the savage nature of Foul Body Autopsy, the theatricality of Ward XVI or the darkness of The Sun’s Journey Through the Night; what they do have is a history that has seen them face down the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and still remain standing; bruised, but unbowed. Still sporadically producing new music, there are enough InMe shirts at Leicester this evening to prove they are still close to many hearts.
And, before you know it, it’s time for Pitchshifter and the closing phases of Uprising 2026. Reliable accounts suggest booking the band was easy as pie after last year’s appearance by Earthtone9, and a simple telephone call to seal the deal.
Half-a-dozen album in eleven years through the Nineties and Pitchshifter were being lauded as the great British hope for industrial music. Back-to-back years at Milton Keynes bowl, with Black Sabbath in 1998 and Metallica in 1999 sealed the deal for one the countries most imaginative and dangerous bands. Those shows, coming off the back of the extraordinary www.pitchshifter.com record, placed a marker into the ground, stating that these Nottingham lads would carry UK hopes into the new millennium.
Wearing identical shirts, the band take the stage to Triad, from the 1993 Desensitized album, after which some wag calls for an “older one”, to which JS makes a quip about the age of the band, introducing Microwaved to great appreciation. He belies his supposed age by making continuous leaps from the monitors and general high energy that may challenge to output of Stampin’ Ground’s Adam.
he wag doesn’t get his wish as Triad is the oldest tune from the band’s back-catalogue, with only Infotainment’s Virus airing from around the same time. Understandably, the focus of the set is shared between .com and the most recent record – relatively speaking – 2002’s PSI.
Eight Days, We Know and Shutdown are interspersed with What’s In It For Me and Deviant’s pairing of Scene This and Hidden Agenda. This is my first Pitchshifter show since they headlined at Damnation Festival back in 2008, and it doesn’t seem that the years have been unkind to either the band themselves or the significance of their music.
PSI’s Down takes us into the closing trio of .com tunes, the 8-bit stylings of W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G., which might not mean a whole lot to folk below a certain age; the chaotic Please Sir takes us up to the limit and the closer, Genius, stomps its electronic boots all over the wearied souls of Leicester, who rise to the occasion one last time.
The future of the Leicester Academy seems in doubt going forward, with contracts coming to an end and uncertainty surround any new operator, yet Uprising have confirmed the 2027 show will go ahead at an as-yet undisclosed venue. Perhaps not the country’s most glamourous, must-attend, festival, but Uprising is the heartbeat of what makes festivals of such vital importance. Not only do they give people like me the ability to chunner-on for three-thousand words, but also the chance to catch up with folks you don’t see from one event to the next.
More importantly, it allows bands to showcase their wares and lets up hear your soon-to-be new favourite band for the first time. And long may that continue.
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