Gig Review - Sepultura / The Inbreds / Vallenbrosa / Mishkin - Leeds Rio's 18/08/07**** We arrive just as Leeds band Mishkin are onstage, they sound decent enough, perhaps slightly guilty of trying to ram too many time changes / riffs / styles into each song, but hell, who writes really good riff driven songs anymore ? To answer that question, Vallenbrosa arrive in a big welter of riffage, with well constructed songs, and, hello old friend, solo's, quite a lot of solo's actually. This is proper heavy metal with big catchy hooks and the sort of songs you can get into right away. Singer Nik shouts out that Vallenbrosa are "From the dirty, dirty South, but please don't hold that against us". They play some good music, a few heads are being banged and they get the thumbs up all round from P, Chez and myself. The Inbreds are another set of Southerners, 6 of them this time. As I watched the array of guitarists squeezing themselves onto the none too large Rio stage I was a little worried that this would be a muddy wall of noise, but apparently I've lived long enough for real metal to have come back into fashion again and we get treated to another good set of proper songs and tight riffs. Frontman Joseph Smith has a bit of attitude and star quality, he's mouthy, sweary and obnoxious, excellent for a metal band then. The band crunch through their set, I can't remember any of the titles except for 'Pocket Full Of Mindfuck Drugs' due to Joe's rambling introduction to it, but again it's a good set. What a result, 3 support band and all of them pretty good. Headliners Sepultura, well, there are exactly half of Sepultura here now the Igor has followed brother Max into Soulfly, set the crowd off. A moshpit of dickheads erupts behind me, I can't figure some people out, if you want a fight then piss off onto the streets with all the other drunken tossers, as for the bloke who was deliberately kicking people, well you do understand why I reacted quite angrily to this don't you ? Arsehole. Right, the Seps then, Derrick Green is a good vocalist, but I can hear him when he's talking, when they get into the songs I can hardly hear a thing, it just sounds a bit mushy. They play quite a lot of stuff from their past few albums, which is fair enough, bands have to progress. There is a shout of "I'm over 25, play some of the good stuff" from the back, I sort of agree, I would have liked to hear some more of the Max era Sepultura, I think it had a more defined sound. We do get 'Roots Bloody Roots', 'Arise' and 'Troops Of Doom', the band throw in a mid set intro quiz of old numbers, how annoying, just when you think you're going to get a song they swap into something else. Still, it's a pretty good set, well received by the crowd. The ticket price tonight was £18 plus the ruddy booking fee, but I feel it was a good value night out. A couple of week ago P and myself went to a 4 band death metal night in the downstairs room here and thought we'd been badly done to by having to pay £4 for the privilege. Mishkin Website Mishkin MySpace Vallenbrosa website Vallenbrosa MySpace The Inbreds website